I’m sorry but I can’t help to hate it. It feels like the start of a kind of capitalist cancer, eating its way through the ecosystem, taking away the freedom of maintainers and turning them into slaves for maintenance fee-payers, and eventually goodware into crapware.

How can one simultaneously be paid for maintenance and also be free of liability? And should someone forking an open source project now be treated as a criminal for interrupting someone’s livelihood?

Finally, it feels that paying a recurring subscription is against the ethos of the “open source forefathers” so to speak. Open source software originated from a world where we paid once for software, like DVDs, not like Netflix. And I would have hoped the world has realised this was a bad idea and is trying to circle back, not undo the path backwards.