NPM recently had the developer of colors.js upload a version that broke a lot of programs because he had no incentive to be aligned with the users of his libraries.

and the fact that it was opensource let others fork it and remove the broken commit, effectively enforcing the power that the users had on the creator. Had it been a closed source (free as in beer) software, the users would have been locked out and with no recourse other than caving to the creator demands.