You can watch this same process unfold live before your eyes with Android OS, or if you don’t want to miss the beginning of the show, grab some popcorn and watch these guys.

No, I have money to pay instead. If I were able to contribute to the effort, I would have said that. Just picking fights in response to open questions today?

Does anyone know if there’s any chance for a fork before this situation inevitably deteriorates? I dont know the license on that software enough to know if its an option.

Unfortunately, there is no historical example where this hasn’t turned predatory. It’s a tale as old as venture capital has been in software development:

• get free contributions from altruistic people donating their time and expertise to your FOSS project that you’re selling
• make a closed-source set of extensions as optional dependencies
• slowly diverge the closed source feature set to include developer and user “must-haves” you do not contribute upstream
• slow or functionally halt open source contributions

It is an oft-repeated long con to pull off a mass heist of donated skill and time while imposing vendor lock-in on your users through a back door.

"As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”

The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”

Packing the group with loyalists may quiet dissent, but as we’ve seen, loyalty does not relate to competency. So they’re more free to do whatever they want, but at least they’re real bad at doing it.