>I certainly wouldn’t use it after seeing them remove features.

All sorts of projects remove features all the time though, even the linux kernel drops support for hardware that may or may not be in use somewhere

>Their users are entitled to get salty and go find alternative products.

People are entitled to feeling things of course, others will only point out that it may not be justified and that the user is liable to get hurt again if they never adjust their expectations to meet reality

I think (and I suspect many users would agree) that there is a big difference between "we are removing some unmaintained drivers for a piece of hardware which almost no one is using" and "we are removing a tentpole feature from the 'open-source' version of our application and making it exclusive to the paid edition".

>It only works if everyone in the ecosystem is honest

In general, applying this to anything with the general public, I don't expect it to work. This is why we have laws, licenses and rules in the first place. You can preach all you want but it won't change humanity, you need something concrete, something written and agreed, like a license.

Not all licenses protect the freedoms and rights you're used to in other licenses, and it needs to be taken into account when adopting any project. License terms that don't guarantee any sort of support or updates when you need them aren't in consideration at that point.

If you don't trust people, then OSS is not for you.

You can't claim to provide software as a public good, while also gatekeeping it only for specific groups of people. If you want to do that, then choose a restrictive license, with the exact terms of use you're comfortable with, and don't work in the open to begin with. That is a valid strategy if your main priority is getting paid.

My objection is towards people who use OSS licenses, but then take issue when others actually use the freedoms they've granted, and proceed to enshittify the project by removing features, putting them up behind a paywall, and in general being hostile and ignoring the user base they've gained in large part thanks to OSS. This is using OSS as a marketing tactic, which undermines the whole point of open source and the free software movement.

>I cannot imagine how this is used seriously when there is something like Ceph available.

Adopting Ceph is adopting a Ceph engineer, any use-case with the need and funding to run Ceph on production would easily be able to pay for commercial licenses and/or contribute majorly to this or their own fork. They work in different ball-parks entirely

Is it an excuse? Maintaining code costs money, and the previous versions are provided under the license, and you're free to modify it, pull selective patches and maintain them yourself. While It'd be convenient if the license was a promise to develop and maintain features for free in perpetuity, it just isn't.

I run into this in non-company backed open source projects all the time too. Some maintainer gets burned out or non-interested and all they're rewarded is people with pitchforks because they thought there were some sort of obligations to provide free updates and suppport

It is sort of an excuse. I don't use MinIO precisely because of this kind of behaviour - if I cannot easily develop, configure and test our applications, I'm not adopting it commercially, specially when there are a ton of options to choose from. In the end, this hurts the MinIO's enterprise offering. Having a robust, easy to deploy community edition, with predictable features, is a great way of allowing integrators to develop and test using your product, and to help the product to gain traction.

It's different as a) they did offer it for free and b) have to maintain it for the closed version.

However, this is also a classic move, so shouldn't be unexpected behavior these days...

Conversely, if instead of making your users happy to pay you, you've made them happy to use your stuff for free, you own the consequences when you stop giving that stuff away.

Welcome to HN BTW, I see you were inspired to sign up and defend the project owner.

While not notifying of the change earlier is annoying, I also don't see anywhere stated that they're obligated to provide services in addition to just providing me the source. Moreover the build-instructions don't seem complicated at all, anyone already extracting value from this should be capable of pulling the source and keep on running with it.