Now, I know you folks haven't ever done that, but it is such a pattern lately that I almost expect it from any for profit company whose primary product is open source. I don't want to judge you based on the actions of others... but the pattern is so well established now that I have to exercise caution.
Now, in the end, I simply switch to whatever open source fork or alternative crops up (or already exists). But it makes it hard for me to go "Hey everyone, you should be using Astral's X because they are awesome and X is awesome and X is open source. And do 'y'[code contributions, financial sponsorship, buy support from them- whatever it might be] to make sure to support Astral and their development of the open source X code!" ... because I am anticipating the rug pull, taking the trademark and brand down the tube with it. Yet, I really, really, really want to support you folks. I want to tell everyone about your great products. I want to encourage them to use your product and to support you financially.
Talk is cheap, and people talk a lot about supporting projects.
Maybe if we could make some kind of statistics over the number of projects that were abandoned because maintainers didn't feel like working and dealing with random people for free anymore. Make the consequences of freeloading visible somehow.
Make like, a week long "holiday" where you either verify that your company has made an adequate donation to the OSS maintainers that make their products possible, or we all just go on strike for that week. Or... something. I'm sure somebody has a better idea than mine, lets get creative.
> I'm sure somebody has a better idea than mine, lets get creative.
Every creative scheme I've seen someone try to come up with fails to do what charging money for a product can. Charge money for stuff, have a free tier, enjoy sustainable software.
There's also a bunch of cases where adding tiers and payment flows blows the complexity budget and now what used to be a good idea is no longer worth it.
But I wouldn't mind being compensated for sharing what I create by those who find it useful.
With that being said, the worst case scenario is that they go caput, but that still leaves the python community with a set of incredible new rust-based tools. So definitely a net win for the python community either way!