alt Hacker News> then doing a bait-and-switch
FOSS is not a moral contract. People working for free owe nothing to no one. You got what's on the tin - the code is as open source once they stop as when they started.
The underlying assumption of your message is that you are somehow entitled to their continued labour which is absolutely not the case.
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It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract.
it's still a bait and switch, considering they started removing features before the abandonment.
This isn’t about people working for free.
Nobody sensible is upset when a true FOSS “working for free” person hangs up their boots and calls it quits.
The issue here is that these are commercial products that abuse the FOSS ideals to run a bait and switch.
They look like they are open source in their growth phase then they rug pull when people start to depend on their underlying technology.
The company still exists and still makes money, but they stopped supporting their open source variant to try and push more people to pay, or they changed licenses to be more restrictive.
It has happened over and over, just look at Progress Chef, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis, Terraform, etc.
Everyone is keying on forced free labor, but that's not really the proposed solution when an open-source project ends. The fact that it ends is a given, the question then is what to do about all the users. Providing an offramp (migration tools that move to another solution that's similar, or even just suggested other solutions, even including your own commercial offering) before closing up shop seems like a decent thing to do.