They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).
This is literally the business model of most VC and public companies.
A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.
Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.
But they all universally had a rather smug attitude that what THEY were working on was morally above what the rest of us were because they were just doing non-commercial r&d loss making stuff.
They didn’t sully themselves with anything to do with the core business!
Of course this steps over the darker aspects of the core business which funds their generous “non commercial” fun jobs…