Companies are never just money. There is a monumental difference between:
1. A small company which is barely profitable but is building something which aligns with your values and you see as a positive to the world.
2. A massive mega corporation whose only purpose is profit, mistreats employees, and you view as highly unethical.
You shouldn’t treat those the same way. It’s perfectly ethical to offer your work for free to the first one (helping them succeed in creating a better world) and charging up the wazoo (or better yet, refusing to engage in any way with) the second one.
A company is not a person, and can literally have its entire staff changed in short order. Or be bought.
Companies have no morals. Sometimes people in companies do, but again, that person can vanish instantly.
You should treat a company as a person which may receive a brain transplant at any time. Most especially, when writing contracts or having any expectation of what that company will do.
A business that is privately owned, is run by its founders and which represents the lion's share of its officers income and net worth can be dealt with like any other small business.
Some guy who makes bespoke firmware for industrial microcontrollers or very niche audio encoding software isn't Microsoft. You won't be able to do business with him in a useful way if you treat him like Microsoft.
There exist companies which have taken VC money, and others which haven’t. We’ve carved out one exception, but this doesn’t indicate that small personally-run companies can’t exist, right?
The key is contract. Casual chat with a corporate representative who isn’t selling you something about something you own requires some sort of contractual relationship and consideration.
If you want to be extreme don't distribute it to them in the first place. Licenses do not come into effect until after distribution. So you could have a pay-to-download model that comes with a %100 discount if you're a lone developer or an organization with under X amount of revenue. You wouldn't be able to stop someone redistributing it after the fact, but you're not engaging.
Unfortunately now that everything is based on automated pipelines, something that doesn't integrate well is not so good.
Although at work we have a provider of proprietary software that has an APT repository where the URL includes a secret token, so they can track from where it's being accessed.
1. A small company which is barely profitable but is building something which aligns with your values and you see as a positive to the world.
2. A massive mega corporation whose only purpose is profit, mistreats employees, and you view as highly unethical.
You shouldn’t treat those the same way. It’s perfectly ethical to offer your work for free to the first one (helping them succeed in creating a better world) and charging up the wazoo (or better yet, refusing to engage in any way with) the second one.