It would certainly be a shitty experience, if there actually was a rugpull, which there was not. People who were using the version of Datastar that had all those features are still free to keep using that version. No one is taking it away. No rug was pulled.
> a contract is established between developers and potential users
Sorry, but no. The license makes this quite clear–every open source license in the world very explicitly says 'NO WARRANTY' in very big letters. 'No warranty' means 'no expectations'. Please, don't be one of those people who try to peer-pressure open source developers into providing free software support. Don't be one of the people who says that 'exposure' is a kind of payment. I can't put food on my table with 'exposure'. If you think 'exposure' by itself can be monetized, I'm sorry but you are not being realistic. Go and actually work on monetizing an open source project before you make these kinds of claims.
> why even bother releasing software?
Much research and study is not useful for many people. Why even bother doing research and development? Because there are some who might find it useful and convert it into something that works for themselves. Open source software is a gift. The giving of the gift does not place obligations on the giver. If you give someone a sweater, are you expected to keep patching it whenever it develops holes?
> If a project is not maintained anymore, it can be archived, or maintenance picked up by someone else.
Then why can't it be maintained by someone else in the case of using the old free version?
> A web framework, no matter how simple, will break eventually, most likely in a matter of months.
Sure, the ones that depend on a huge npm transitive dependency cone can. But libraries or frameworks like htmx and Datastar are not like that, they are single <script> files that you include directly in your HTML. There is no endless treadmill of npm packages that get obsoleted or have security advisories all the time.
> You expect people who want to build a web site and move on with their lives to dig into a foreign code base, and fix the web framework?
Well...ultimately, if I use some open source software, I am actually responsible for it. Especially if it's for a commercial use case. I can't just leech off the free work of others to fix or maintain the software to my needs. I need to either fix my own issues or pay someone to do it. If the upstream project happens to do it for me, I'm in luck. But that's all it is. There is ultimately no expectation that open source maintainers will support me for free, perpetually, when I use their software.
> A few people (that we know of) were directly impacted by this
What impact? One guy blogged that just because there are some paid features, it automatically kills the whole project for him. There's no clear articulation of why exactly he needs those exact paid features. Everything else we've seen in this thread is pile-ons.
> Doubling down on this, ignoring and dismissing such feedback as "performative"
Aren't you doing the same thing? You have been ignoring and dismissing the feedback that this is actually not that big of a deal. Why do you think that your opinion carries more weight than that of the actual maintainers and users of the project?