Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

Depends on the actual software licence, many commercial vendors do provide source code, however the licence doesn't allow you to do whatever you feel like with code, even if technically it is possible to do so.

This happens a lot in commercial products where scripting languages are used, for example.

Or enterprise consulting as another example, where the code is delivered as part of the project, but it is bound to the agency for compiling purposes, unless the customer pays extra for that right.

IMO if you're a technical decision maker, you should ignore fair source/business source stuff with extreme prejudice. These are fundamentally incompatible with the goal of having autonomy for your systems.

Only pick these if they're non-critical, have a significantly higher RoI, or a high commodity item.

It's hard to feel any sympathy for people who spend money and still bend over.

For most people it is only business, there is zero FOSS ideology.

A hard lesson many have come to learn when there are bills to pay, and coffee priced donations hardly make it.

This whole discussion is about FLOSS projects where the right to "do whatever you feel like with code" is well established - even literally so, in the case of purely private/internal changes that are not distributed to or publicly performed for any third party.

Apparently not, given how often people get surprised what happens to their code.

Apparently the do whatever isn't do whatever when it happens to their little bonsai project.

It's not about ideology per se—the dark humor in my mind is that you're not just paying for software you run yourself, you're paying to not be able to modify it. There's a reason why that sort of arrangement is dying and SaaS is stronger than ever—paying to access a server at least makes more sense as a transaction, even if it is just about as economically inefficient.