Having to put food on the table, plus the shitty business model (or lack thereof) of open source, means that it is probably either charging or not having the apps at all. The author has written code and released it under liberal licenses for years, and now they want (or worse, need because their life conditions changed) some income from the effort.
> they could someday stop updates to these apps too to replace them with another monetization scheme
The code is still being written and kindly released under the terms of an open source license, so if that happens, I'd expect that sufficiently motivated people moved by strong needs or ideals would be able to fork it and keep using (and possibly even improving) them without issue, as the license explicitly allows for it.
> they could someday stop updates to these apps too to replace them with another monetization scheme
The code is still being written and kindly released under the terms of an open source license, so if that happens, I'd expect that sufficiently motivated people moved by strong needs or ideals would be able to fork it and keep using (and possibly even improving) them without issue, as the license explicitly allows for it.