It's somewhere between bait and switch & dumping. It's very hard to compete against free. And it's very hard to make money when you give away your product for free. Cloud hosting was a way out of that conundrum. But that window is now closing as the big cloud operators move in + the rise of Docker making hosting much easier.
> And it's very hard to make money when you give away your product for free. Cloud hosting was a way out of that conundrum.
But surely it's only a conundrum if the primary goal of a software project is for a single company that has the same name as the software project to exclusively make money by selling hosting and/or support for that software while still using an open source license to attract a community of developers to work for you for free. I'd argue that this conundrum is easily resolvable: either have an open source software project for which anyone can sell support and hosting, or have a software company that develops proprietary software and sells it and related services.
