Life is hard in a world full of infidels:
"The future of Eclipse is in danger," Michael Scharf, a member of the Eclipse Foundation's architecture council, said in an angry April blog post. "The problem is that there is no real pressure for companies to contribute back to the community and it is easy to use the Eclipse 'for free' for their own products. The Eclipse community should create peer pressure to prevent the freeloaders and parasites from getting away without punishment," he wrote.
Scharf likens the lack of contributions back to the community to the "tragedy of the commons," in which greedy individuals unthinkingly destroy a shared resource. And in an e-mail exchange, he put it this way: "The general mentality of the industry frustrates me; the attitude to take advantage of something like open source and not give back anything to the system."
Then don't offer it for free! By definition, open source cannot be a true tragedy of the commons issue because it's a commons that cannot be exploited to the point of being worthless and beyond repair, since it is based on intellectual property, not physical property or real estate. As the head of the Eclipse Foundation rightly noted, however, the mass adoption of Eclipse's products creates a lot of opportunity for contributors to the Eclipse products to either sell services or make products that Eclipse users would want to buy.
The amount that a company should contribute back is proportional to how much they modified the original product. If Linksys added a whole new CPU architecture to the Linux kernel, then they should contribute that. If they added only some kernel drivers to make the Linux kernel work on their proprietary hardware, then that's not necessary or even sensible to ask of them. You might as well ask them to give up some of their core product IP in cases like that. In others, like Southwest Airline's use of MuleSource, if their modifications are business-specific and not useful to anyone other than their competitors, that too is just asking too much. Asking them to make original contributions as a way of saying "thank you" for getting the open source software is not just unrealistic, but the sort of demand that only an extremist could make (I'm not attributing that demand to Scharf).
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