Community edition and paid Enterprise plug-ins with support is a standard pattern in the OSS market.
Not quite bait & switch as you put it, and frankly polishing and idiot proofing tools for production workloads is expensive, and requires competent professionals that definitely need to feed themselves and their family.
It's usually a full open source solution and then the enterprise edition gets introduced later to make money. In other words, it's dumping to gain market share and then later trying to use the cornered market to extract profit.
There is absolutely nothing wrong or illegal with companies offering new additional products.
You're not cornered when you can freely choose to buy the enterprise product depending on whether you get any value from it or stick with the open-source version which remains available and has plenty of competition (like Rancher).
In fact that entire issue with Docker is that they have too little value to charge for and too much competition to defend against, the exact opposite of dumping to clear out the market.
Indeed. I’ve worked with several “enterprises” and often the OSS option was discarded for lack of support for certain enterprise use-case or integration with other commercial products; or for lack of professional support for production issues and SLAs.
Obviously this stuff costs effort and time, you can’t expect that to be available for free.
It’s also a great opportunity to commercially exploit your knowledge and taste and make a living out of it; rather than curse “the powers that be” on a daily basis, while struggling with closed software whose only purpose has always been milking as much profit possible
Not quite bait & switch as you put it, and frankly polishing and idiot proofing tools for production workloads is expensive, and requires competent professionals that definitely need to feed themselves and their family.