When a project is abandoned, when updates are slow, when features people want are not being released, when tracking upstream dependency updates are delayed, sure, you are not entitled to anything and I’ll be the first one to say get off your butt and contribute. In the other hand when you engage with the community for years under an OSS/free context then once the community has invested in your project, learning it, creating learning resources for it, integrating it into their own projects, and you never communicated your intention to “wait until it gets big then then pull the rug” it feels like a disingenuous bait and switch. The reason it feels that way is because it is a disingenuous bait and switch. This is even more so the case when you built your project on top of other projects.

I have no problem using a paid product or service or paying for support on a OSS product, but will never pay one of these bait and switch scams a dime, no matter how much engineering effort it takes.

I understand the sentiment and where it comes from, and I'm not saying it's a good decision from Broadcom (I think it is a bad one indeed!). But still, this risk is part of the game. Even if it was full opensource and with a broad community, it was still a single vendor, not even a non-profit umbrella like the Apache or Linux Foundation. So, the risk of trusting a single vendor was there.

The good thing of it being opensource is that someone else (company, community, foundation or whatever) can step in, fork it, and maintain it from now on, unlike what happens with proprietary software or SaaS.

It’s Broadcom. Don’t use anything from them unless you can’t avoid it.

Same applies to Oracle.