I think people overreact (or at least I overreact) because of two things: 1. A kind of "psychological contract" is in place between a package maintainer/creato

I think people overreact (or at least I overreact) because of two things: 1. A kind of "psychological contract" is in place between a package maintainer/creator and the developers using it and that is somewhere along the lines of "assuming good faith" or "good intentions" from the maintainer and giving back somekind of "kindness" to maintainer specially in cases of of some OSS (MIT, Apache, BSD-2/3 ...). This maintainer broke this contract - the trust of its users. They are pissed and rightly so. He broke is because he also felt that another "psychological contract" was broken between himself and the market. So his users are pissed because they see this as retaliation from the maintainer to them without them doing anything to merit this. 2. Another aspect is that he could have gone multiple ways to try to get money from companies by pivoting his projects. But his action is an emotional response with a hint of political activism that caused damage also to developers who are not having the choice (they are not decision makers or not managing budgets) nor the desire to be part of this. So for them there is another breach of "contract" happening: using those libraries seems to have a hidden term "you will be used as collateral when needed in my fight against big companies" which they did not agreed and was not explicit.