> From a business perspective, you don't want to alienate developers who work to build your ecosystem.

This does not follow, in Twitter's case. If Twitter's API made them money, they wouldn't have shut it down, but it's the exact opposite, it costs them money while providing no monetary benefit. So in this case, from the business perspective, it is correct to start charging for it.

Now they could spend 3 months but with debt service payments of a billion dollars a year, I highly doubt that they have the patience to wait that long.