A collective yawn
In a way, Brett Glass was correct, but he always managed to get frenzied on the subject. The truth is that there's really not a whole lot of money to be made by improving and packaging free software. The money to be made in selling improvements to open source software is pretty minimal. It's like trying to make money by selling programming languages - just not much of an economy there. And the ones that are in a position to use refinements to freely available software, are not necessarily the kind of companies that garner much sympathy (usually being monopolists and oligopolists).
Modifying MySQL to be faster isn't gonna make or break 99.9% of the web servicebased companies, especially not the starups. Most of the effort in web services must go into the domain specific applications. GPL software may be used in these instances, but it's unlikely that what makes money will ever see the light of day.
As a econ grad, I would note that most capitalists miss the point of free markets. Free markets don't exist for the purpose of allowing companies to make a profit. In the long term, all profits for any market are supposed to be zero. In that light, GPL software shouldn't be seen as anti-capitalist, but rather a response of one set of businesses to reduce their costs at the expense of another set of businesses to charge more for their product.
