As a maintainer of several OS projects with millions of monthly downloads I'm entirely fine with them using it for free. I get too much compensation and recognition for those projects as is anyway IMO and the swag is nice.
There are plenty of ways to monetise MIT like consulting, career building, training and so on - at least for smaller scale but popular projects. Plus OP can now say that a big game studio used his project and it could be a great conference talk :]
I think that the micro-celebritism is tiring and toxic for our industry, most of my open source stuff is stuff other people could write and I'm just glad I have the privilege to help.
I'm literally writing this comment from an airport at a country I wanted to visit and was flown into because of open source I wrote (they paid for a vacation for a conference). I'm having a hard time complaining :]
It's not like maintainer burnout isn't real and there aren't issues in open source but we also really need to fix the culture around it IMO.
There are plenty of ways to monetise MIT like consulting, career building, training and so on - at least for smaller scale but popular projects. Plus OP can now say that a big game studio used his project and it could be a great conference talk :]