I guess the core issue was always having a for-profit company preside over a "free" product. Clearly, they have to make money, and they aren't bound by ethics o

I guess the core issue was always having a for-profit company preside over a "free" product. Clearly, they have to make money, and they aren't bound by ethics of open source. Contributors may feel like they are contributing to a FOSS project, but they aren't. What Stack exchange is doing is probably legal (?) and that's the bar they need to clear. The contributors aren't stakeholders and SE only needs to retain enough of them to sustain themselves commercially. There's been more than a decade of companies now providing something for free, while they figure out how to monetize it, and these always scare me a little, because its always going to end up like this. Users of Facebook becoming eyeballs for ads, GitHub users providing free data for LLMs, SE selling data to Open AI... If a product is free, then you are the product. And if you don't know how you are monetized, you're going to be disappointed by it sooner or later.