Even going into maintenance-only mode will not stop companies from having to find creative ways to collect money from their customers long after the initial pur

Even going into maintenance-only mode will not stop companies from having to find creative ways to collect money from their customers long after the initial purchase. Maintenance costs money. People don't want to pay a lot of money up front. They also don't want to pay for upgrades or subscriptions if they don't feel like they're getting something useful from time to time. Unfortunately, most people who buy consumer-grade proprietary software don't seem to feel that "being stable and well-maintained" is a useful feature on its own even without any new features. (Enterprise software is a different beast, of course. A very large part of RHEL's value proposition is that it doesn't get any new features, only security fixes, for a decade.)