Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

I understand why users get annoyed at "rugpulls", but if a company that is doing the vast majority of the work to develop and maintain a project is not financially sustainable they don't have that many options. An article like this really needs to include info about the financials.

I'm honestly curious since I've been considering how I license my large OSS projects lately [1], and I really do want to understand what would be "acceptable" here. Start more funding campaigns for the project? Work on it less? Sell merch? Openly communicate that they'll need to re-license without additional funding?

[1] - https://jackson.dev/post/oss-licensing-sucks/

The hate comes from the company offering it under an OSS license and then taking it away. If they had started with a non-OSS license users wouldn't feel betrayed. Of course then they may not have had as many users, which is why they tried to be OSS to start with.

AFAIK, Mongo, Elastic, Redis, and Hashicorp were all doing fairly well financially when they did their "rug pulls". They maybe weren't doing as well as they wanted to, but they weren't on the verge of collapse either. In the case of Hashicorp, it was probably a strategy to sweeten the acquisition by IBM.

I was fascinated by the reference to mimir forking into an SSPL version. that seems like the right way to do things.