As far as I know as someone who worked here for 7+ years (take this as personal opinion), Mapbox wants to keep investing heavily in open source and open data sustainably and indefinitely, and this GL JS change is an unevitable prerequisite for that. This may not be easily apparent at this moment but it will be soon.
Introducing a drastic billing change under the implied threat that your year or more of man hours performed using an underlying open source library with an understandable billing model is now potentially at risk, is shady. These billing changes make some self hosted tile users go from $0 to tens of thousands of dollars a month in usage. It’s shady, don’t lie to yourself.
Also, you are not your company. I am not saying you are shady, because you are just a person who has bills and a skill and you need a salary. Don’t conflate criticisms of your employer as attacks on yourself, or you can have a hard time seeing what other people see. Tricking yourself to believe something that might not be true is one of the worst thing you can do.
This only happens if the developer deliberately upgrades and adds a token. If you do nothing and you keep using v1 - nothing changes for you.
The frustrating thing is that we just went through this with google. We paid a reasonable amount, but then got extorted to pay more or jump ship. We jumped ship to a reputable company, mapbox, and we paid a reasonable sum of money for how we used the software, and now the cycle continues. To be clear, I am not complaining that we are paying $0 and we should get the benefits for free. I am saying that we shouldn't be jumped up multiple orders of magnitude in cost, which isn't in-line with our actual usage. That's the shady part.
With move like this, what's the difference?
(Yes, I do share anonfornoreason's sentinent in the sibling comment.)
It's no different to the likes of Oracle. Oracle also employs hundreds of people.
But hey, if you think everyone who criticizes it is full of vitriol, I don't think any further discussion is needed.