Humm no. OVH is French, OVH US is not, both are two different subsidiaries. In fact, you cannot order OVH US infrastructures with a European OVH account, you need to create a US account.
Profiting from selling their patchset is not the whole story, though. grsec was public and free for a long time and there were many effects at play preventing the kernel from adopting it.
Professionally he's running a successful code/security consultancy [2]. This pays his bills, so that nerd-wise he is running his own web server and content management system where everything is self-written, inclusive of his own libC implementation with a focus on bare minimum requirements. [1] He's been around in the German IT community for decades and was earlier involved in Chaos Computer Club (CCC) where he still used to attend their annual congress, which is kind of the "meet and greet" of the German IT community.
His self-hosted blog was/is very popular/controversial. He is pretty opinionated on nearly everything and he's not taking hostages when he criticizes someone. So the "woke" people don't like him, the nazis don't like him, the corpo guys don't like him. And he pretty much doesn't care.
Earlier this year he apparently suffered some critical health condition and went quiet without notice for more than 6 months, I believe.
Sticking with your analogy -- your townsfolk getting energy for free. As rational people they must include the possibility of free service being over at any time in their planning and act accordingly. Otherwise they're just freeloading.
Of course they are freeloading - and users often suck - but your latter doesn't follow.
It's fair in the singular case (IE if this is the only open source/free thing you use), but especially as you are dealing with more and more things like this (IE use lots of open source), it is totally irrational to expect them to plan for any of 50 open source projects they use to stop at any time.
It violates general good faith expectations. Just because someone is doing something for free doesn't mean you expect them to fail or stop - The cost is fairly orthogonal to most people's expectations. I don't expect any package in my linux distro to just stop existing or working at any time.
Sure, it would be sensible to plan for eventual failure of things you depend on, but it's not rational to expect people to plan for random failure of any of the things they depend on at any time, regardless of the cost of those things.
More to the point, it's not entitlement on their part to avoid sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time :)
The projects also often have the perspective of "it shouldn't be tha big a thing" but that's because they ignore they are not the only thing happening in their users world.
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