That's perfectly fine but the investor exists in this scenario because of the user base that the product has; and the user base itself exists in part because of the features that were given for free and later are removed. Would they have been able to even have investment if the parts they want to charge for, had been charged for from the start, to avoid the bait and switch?
As a thought experiment, what if instead of the company removing the web UI, the company had folded and left 1.x as the last version of MinIO, while some new company was formed which forked MinIO 1.x to a different name and removed those things, offering them under a freemium model?
I think in that scenario, it would be much more clear-cut that the responses would be:
1. Well that's a bummer that MinIO wasn't sustainable as it was; I'll just stick with 1.x forever, or
2. Well thank goodness this new company stepped up and is taking over maintenance and development; I'm willing to pay them to get ongoing support and having continued access to the web console feature in new versions seems like a fair price to pay.
I don't actually think it would go down like that so I think the point is moot, but are we really going to go through this again? Developers should (and often do) know better than to get into these unsustainable situations, but they still do it.
I have some unsolicited advice: please don't open source something that you are actively planning to sell. Nobody will take this advice of course, because delivering your product as an open source project is an easy way to generate some leads and even get some free labor here and there. But if you don't want people to feel deceived, start with your expectations out front and magically people won't be angry at you.
On the other hand, I agree people wouldn't be angry at company B in this scenario, because they're not the ones who set the incorrect expectations to begin with. OTOH though I really do doubt "we just removed some features so we could charge you for them" would be a successful pitch as a brand new vendor for something.
I'm struggling to understand how there's even still a lot of debate on this subject because it's very simple, if you can pull off a sustainable FOSS project then the world will be grateful but in many cases it becomes very clear over time that there was effectively no plan, just a lot of hope that maybe things would work out somehow. Whatever good that is.
> "we just removed some features so we could charge you for them"
I think the pitch would be more like "we want to focus our more limited resources toward ensuring the core of the product is as good as possible, and there isn't a way to continue shipping an unmaintained version of the UI, so we haven't brought that part of MinIO into the community version of <new product name XX>. By offering it as a paid option, we hope to be able to sustainably maintain both the open and closed parts of XX over the long term."
I mean look, whether it makes sense or not, the proposition is you pay for the privilege of using things you already had for free so that you can help someone else bootstrap a sustainable business off of something (something that they didn't even make in that case, for what it's worth.) If there was a Linux Foundation fork, I'm pretty sure it would win out rather quickly.
With open source, I think what companies really want is an open source project that is maintained by people with stakes in the project, but complementary ones rather than primary. Helping pay for a new business seems like a worse proposition than just getting some major stakeholders to donate a headcount or two; yeah, it's expensive, but it's probably a better status quo and should nearly indefinitely cut out any concerns about rent seeking behavior.
