Glad to hear that it is sponsored - I did not know that. I agree with your points on the injustice, but with OSS it is hard to have it both ways. Lots of innovation comes from using OSS as building blocks by folks just starting out, who cannot afford it. Maybe we need more vocal social stigma against large profitable companies who built their company on free software and who don't give back. I've seen a couple good things happen recently though - with GPG and FreeBSD. Hopefully it is the beginning of a trend.
Pivotal is arguably a grand experiment to try to build an eventual RedHat-sized revenue stream on open source through subscription pricing. It's $300m now, and everything is open source or just was announced will be open sourced this year. Most of it in house R&D, some like Redis is sponsored patronage.
What's interesting is that most enterprises don't really want to freeride - they don't have the knowledge or legal will (indemnity) to go it alone, plus have esoteric requirements that usually don't lead to good open source projects and will pay for proprietary add-ins.
The main free riders are startups that couldn't afford a subscription anyway (until they scale and want help), along with service/cloud providers that are at such enormous scale and have such a large braintrust that they can go it alone. These are the organizations IMO (the Googles of the world) that really need to sponsor individuals and OSS foundations to avoid a tragedy (like GPG or even OpenSSL).
