Sounds like two things have happened. 1) They discovered that more commercial use of the free licenses was occuring than they were comfortable with, hence the w

Sounds like two things have happened. 1) They discovered that more commercial use of the free licenses was occuring than they were comfortable with, hence the weird licensing and move to only prebuilt VM images, 2) They realised people were basically using the licenses to keep old hardware chugging along, instead of investing in the platform's future, hence the move to only licensing amd64 in the future. I can understand it from their perspective, but it's absolutely the wrong move. What they need to do if they really want to revitalise the platform's future is inspire and excite people about the idea of building on it. Not only is this not doing that, it's going to have the exact opposite effect, because now this leaves a taste in people's mouths that building on this platform means building on shakey ground. Shame, but I don't have a dog in the race except having a soft-spot for alternative architectures.