Put bluntly: We live in a world that success is most often, and routinely, measured in currency. If a company can't convert users into direct paying customers (e.g., I give them money, they give me a service, not talking about ads means you the product type customer) in one way or another, they may instead either turn the customer into the product (ads, for instance) or seek profitable partnerships to sustain the organization and themselves

I can't always blame them, really, families need to be fed, people need to feel like it's worth it, and so on. In so many ways, it really does suck because I feel like it stifles innovative ideas, particularly ones that need long term execution. Look at Redis and licensing, it's the same thing, really, in terms of struggle.

If we had a separate way for engineers / companies to fall back where they did not have to worry about this in the same way, then I believe this wouldn't happen the same way, if at all, in many of these circumstances.