Lots of people decide to give away things of value for free, sometimes competing with commercial interests. Right now we're all reading this website courtesy of the Linux system that hosts it, and many of us are viewing it on Linux-based Android devices. Linux, of course, was essentially crowdsourced, and many of the contributors didn't get a penny from anyone for writing the code. Is this a good thing, or should we all be ashamed for taking bread out of the mouths of the children of those hardworking professional programmers at Microsoft and Apple? Anywhere you post images online is going to be making money for someone, usually by selling adverts. Yes, the Guardian gets some page impressions from your content, though a few amateur butterfly pictures on a community section of the website aren't exactly clickbait and don't directly compete with pro work - the point is to show readers' pictures, not stock images. The Guardian itself provides vast quantities of (mostly) high quality content without a paywall. It's owned by a trust, founded on a large donation, and doesn't have a proprietor or shareholders to satisfy - the profits, if there ever are any (they are making large losses at the moment) would be ploughed back into journalism. And it's a valuable counterweight to the relentlessly right-wing press that helped bring us, amongst other things, the joys of Brexit. If you want to make a profit running a print and open access online newspaper in the Internet age, you really need to run a trashy, spite-filled rag like the Mail or the Express.
