> Big companies profit immensely from free labor and give little or nothing back.

I don't know if it's still going on today, but for many years I knew many people that were FTEs working exclusively on open source - with only the priorities being set by the company employing them.

But - the largest evidence that this is fake is that people continue to contribute to open source freely. A lot of it is profit inspired free work, but yes, almost everyone writing code either has a well paying job or will.