A number of companies are successfully charging for use of their open-source software as a hosted service. For example, getsentry.com and travis-ci.org.
That's what I thought too, until I did more research on ICO and couldn't come up with an answer for "Why use png in addition to ico?" in the FAQ (well, except for touch devices where ico isn't supported). Notice how that FAQ question is empty.
But if you could submit a pull request with a bulleted list of PNG advantages over ICO, I'd be happy to include it. Seriously.
Agreed that it needs some real innovation, something better than this. Consider it just a start: the fact that the spiderable package is one of the first ones out means that it is something the Meteor team cares about trying to solve. It's certainly not perfect, but it paves the way for future iterations.
Why is this interesting? Because 1) search engine crawlability matters and 2) the more AJAXy web apps get, the harder it is to make them crawlable.
The more we move away from traditional web "pages" to rich web apps that do everything through DOM manipulations on a single page, the harder it is for the search engine robots to crawl what we build.
Not all employers care for open-source code samples. But the ones who do are looking to hire people with a deep passion for programming: developers with a passion so strong that they're willing to spend hours of their free time writing open-source libraries and contributing to the open-source world.
A podcast by Python open-source developer Daniel Greenfeld and Clojure/Ruby open-source developer Andrew Cholakian. Very interesting to hear the differing viewpoints and see where they converge.