"People have various answers for open source business models. E.g. "consulting" or the vague “support”. I always wonder if such people ever tried selling consulting? Or maybe “support”."
Oddly enough, that's been most of my career. A fair number of people have paid me a goodly amount of money to install and keep running OS software, and to answer questions from people using it. When I discover problems, I report them to the original developers, including a patch if at all possible.
Burying the lede: "Amazon is still a distant second to the country's largest private employer, Walmart, which employs nearly 1.6 million people in the US, or one out of every 91 workers."
"...especially in the Bay Area. ... But there's a palpable lack of social fabric. I worry that this atomization is becoming a world-wide phenomenon – that we might be some of the first generations without the sort of community that it's in human nature to rely on."
Are we talking about a general problem, or about a group of 20-somethings who grew up with families, went to college where they had a lot of free time with a bunch of others in the same situation, and then moved hundreds or thousands of miles to a place that puts emphasis on lack of ties, short terms, mobility, and long work hours?
'Cause I can assure you that most of the lonely people in the world can't afford $100 per month for a friend network.
I've been reading naval history lately. The thing that strikes me most is that the benefits, such as they are, of war (or in this case, app store review non-support) are collective, but the costs are paid individually.
...until it's your app that has been removed, your company that is going out of business, and the response from the rest of the technological world is, "Eh, collateral damage. Too bad."