Comment by to11mtm

I think I know the pattern they are describing, and it's a semi-unfortunate one.

People make a fairly-complex open source thing. Due to the complexity for certain environments/cases, the author(s) have a commercial support option.

Consumers from bigorg use it, and wind up opening issues wanting free help for their niche use case, no they don't want to get a support contract, but this subset of the user base causes a lot of churn dealing with communication, politely closing such issues (after all, you want to just be polite about support options, not drive them away!)...

And sometimes, it becomes easier to just flip the license.

In the .NET ecosystem, it's come up frequently. There's the cases where I get it; PDF is hell (iTextSharp), Imaging is hell (ImageSharp), Auth is hell (IdentityServer).

But then there's the cases where I just shrug my shoulders (MediatR has plenty of alternatives) or get happy it gives me permission to gleefully get rid of a poorly used lib (AutoMapper).