alt Hacker NewsIn this particular case, it's the fault of the "abused" for even seeing themselves as such in the first place. Many times it's not even a "bait-and-switch", but reality hitting. But even if it was, just deal with it and move on.
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Make hay while the sun shines. Be glad that the project happened.
I’m not even claiming that the “abused” are correct to be upset.
The core of my claim is that it’s a shady business tactic because the purpose of it is to gain all the marketing benefits of open source on the front-end (fast user growth, unpaid contributions from users, “street cred” and positive goodwill), then change to source available/business license after the end of the growth phase when users are locked in.
This is not much different than Southwest Airlines spending decades bragging about “bags fly free” and no fees only to pull the rug and dump their customer goodwill in the toilet.
Totally legal to do so, but it’s also totally legal for me to think that they’re dishonest scumbags.
Except in this case, software companies, in my opinion, have this rug pull plan in place from day 1.
This is definitely the case because the accusations and supposed social contract seem extremely one-sided towards free riding.
Nobody here is saying they should donate the last version of MinIO to the Apache software foundation under the Apache license. Nobody is arguing for a formalized "end of life" exit strategy for company oriented open source software or implying that such a strategy was promised and then betrayed.
The demand is always "keep doing work for me for free".