The profit motive isn't the issue. Even if you don't relinquish control to a VC, you'd still [likely] have a profit motive yourself.

The issue isn't profit. You might say the issue is greed, but more importantly, the issue is a lack of regard and compassion for your customers, and a lack of understanding of the danger this puts you in [of losing your customers and, with them, revenue and profit].

User empathy, if you will.

> but I'm not sure why many are even remotely surprised by these sort of escapades

I don't think people are surprised that these things are possible in the context of "EaaS". It's surprising because they're causing massive problems for their users by making the change so quickly. The relative gain of waiting one month before the change wouldn't hurt them that much, but it would help their customers a great deal. So the surprise is seeing how indifferent they seem to the users. (I know they're revising the decision now. Maybe they can avoid most of the bad PR.)

The free or partially free dev tool industry is extremely competitive and you need a lot of goodwill to stay alive. They're completely free to screw their users, and their users are completely free (except for some lock-in) to hop to the next provider. I don't understand why they would throw away that goodwill.

But maybe I'm wrong and the friction is higher than what I expect.

> But maybe I'm wrong and the friction is higher than what I expect.

It may be for a lot of users. But some people are GitHub refugees and only started using Gitlab relatively recently. I am one of those, and haven't been using Gitlab for long enough to have any serious friction against moving away from it.

> This is a continuous iterative process that should be going through every developer's head with every design choice, external license, "cloud" service, proprietary internally hosted licenses, etc.

The nature of tech trends will ensure that developers never look beyond marketing material that espouses how easy and cool the new shiny tech is.

I'm watching developers go all in on serverless as if the generous and copious amounts of free compute that cloud providers are granting on their serverless platforms will always flow like water.

> The nature of tech trends will ensure that developers never look beyond marketing material that espouses how easy and cool the new shiny tech is.

Not all developers. Some of us have been around the block enough times to be automatically suspicious of marketing material that leans too hard on the "easy and cool" messaging.

> ....external sources that also happen to be for-profit businesses.

Pretty sure a not for profit organization would have even less interest in pleasing their users.

Maybe, but a cooperatively owned and managed business would have complete interest in its members and their values.

What interest do they have other than that?

Depends, it could be just to disrupt all other competitors on cost and not care how miserable the actual experience is for the customers.

Many not for profits exist mainly to stroke the directors’ egos and pay them a fat salary without doing much actual good (e.g. most political non-profits like the Clinton foundation).

Generally, they do have much more interest in pleasing their users. Not only do not-for-profits typically have some kind of explicit charter, it's usually for some social benefit, like "helping users". If anything; they're too helpful, and won't bash users over the head if they're being truculent, making them slow and crufty. Additionally, not-for-profits do need some kind of revenue (typically), and that tends to come from donors, which are usually... users.

If you merely mean free stuff, not literally, not-for-profit... yeah, free but for-profit is pretty much a disaster waiting to happen.

Rant: Those business models by and large should probably be hit with the ban-hammer, immediately. Of course, given the complete and utter submission of congress and indeed the very organization of democracy to vested interests, the chance of actually seeing a functioning, efficient market in our lifetimes is essentially nil.

It's ironic that traditional communism succumbed perhaps partially due to game-theoretical inherent inefficiencies, and capitalism patted itself on the back without ever really looking in the mirror. So, yay, we get to be the human guinea pigs proving that markets aren't actually intrisincally efficient at all, only efficient within their constraints, which is pretty much worthless given how hard we've collectively been trying to saw the legs out from under this construct. Capitalism is itself one big tragedy of the commons.

What bothers me is how screwing users is becoming the new standard. For me trust in society is what enabled first world economies in the first place, instead of business being killed by people constantly looking for ways to screw you. I’m not naive, I own a business, and bad intentioned people exist and you must protect yourself, but assuming the worst in every transaction is not a normal way to think for society.

For my experience usually clients trust me, and I want them to succeed with my services, and contracts and lawyers are here only for the worst case.

I can’t put my finger on it or express it clearly but free market excuse « dissatisfied users can move, this corporation is responsible only for profit, everyone must lawyer up » don’t look like it’s the good direction for society. I don’t see why free market would be incompatible with an individual sense of responsibility towards society, instead of looking for loopholes to screw people. Maybe it’s a consequence of being global and having not community roots.

> For my experience usually clients trust me, and I want them to succeed with my services, and contracts and lawyers are here only for the worst case.

That you genuinely want your clients to succeed is probably why they trust you -- you earn that trust.

I'm of the same mindset. I genuinely care about the well-being of my customers and will always work to enhancing that (even to the point of recommending competing products if they are a better solution for a particular customer). I've never lost business in the long term by doing that -- even customers I refer to competitors remember me and have an increased level of trust in me, and more often than not will do business with me in other ways.

But I have an old-school attitude towards business. My goal is not to gain as much money as quickly as possible, but to build a solid business that is sustainable and profitable over the long term. In my experience, that attitude naturally aligns my business practices with societal responsibility.