They're allowed to stop publishing new work whenever they want to. That's part of the free, open-source software game, wherein: We're all free to provide as much as we wish, and also free to consume as much as we want. Nobody necessarily owes anyone else anything and it's really very beautiful in these ways. This is enabled in large part due to the very low cost of distributing copies of intangible software (which can be very close to zero).
But when money gets involved, then things become different. Contracts can be had. Support requirements can be determined. If a contract requires 5 years of support, then it can be reasonably expected for support to continue for at least 5 years.
It's OK to want that, and to never use software that doesn't involve money. It's also OK for an author/company/org to not want that, and to never agree to those terms.
These are different goals, but one party doing it one way doesn't detract from another party doing it some other way. It's all OK.
I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue.
It is now a common business strategy to commercialise an open source project. FreeNAS was commercialised as TrueNAS, which is now having some of the source pulled.
TrueNAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s built on source projects.
Your statements clearly took issue with the fact that your company has to pay open-source devs whose work it uses for reliability. You presented the options as "pay them, or else get rugpulled", and then went on to say "how did we end up in this state of affairs [where we must pay to not get rugpulled]". There is no possible way to interpret your comment other than lamenting the "state of affairs".
> TrueNAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s built on source projects.
As long as it isn't violating the license of those projects, they still don't owe anyone anything. If it is violating the license, complain about it on those terms. But your complaint was about open-source in general, not specifically only this project.
And with BSD licenced code this is their right.
And it's my and anyone else's right to observe all of this and criticize it.
People act like you're saying Disney should be able to hold a copyright on Mickey Mouse for over 100 years.
Calling it a "rug pull" when the creator of an open source project decides to stop giving away future work for free is a delusional level of self-entitlement.
(1) The previous releases are still open source. If you don't like it, fork the last free release and maintain it yourself.
(2) People deserve whatever the market is willing to pay for their work. See above.
Frankly, if D. Richard Hipp decided to stop giving away future versions of SQLite for free, I would be the first person to congratulate him for finally having the courage to put his foot down and say "my fellow committers and I deserve at least a few million dollars for 20 years of work making something that billions of machines rely upon."