The early theorists of capitalism didn't imagine that advanced psychology (that didn't even exist back then) would be used to convince people to buy $product.
Messages of that sophistication are always dangerous, and modern advertising is the most widespread example of it.
The hostility is more than justified, I can only hope the whole industry is regulated downwards, even if whatever company I work for sells less.
Not to mention their pro features keep breaking syntax of the community version, obviously with 0 transparency.
Now, of course they should get paid for the work they do, but these sort of "we were FOSS and surprise we're not anymore" are becoming commonplace and are always done hoping no one notices.
Honestly, FSL doesn't break any flow for day to day developers. What's the harm? I am curious to know. On the contrary I like competitive vs non-competitive distinction.
Most of us don't want to let a court decide if we compete with a very general distinction you describe, and can't afford lawyers to evaluate a 2 year old license without much case law.
Most of us prefer not to bring on a dependency in our project that is primarily designed to extract commercial value from users and is less friendly to contributors than similar open source projects.
It’s because big tech companies have spent millions to foster goodwill towards the OSI Open Source definition. And there’s a general feeling that software that fits that definition is pure and any that doesn’t is unclean.
Just to be devil's advocate here, and pedantically point out that Debian Sid is not a "distro", I don't think it's correct to say that Debian unstable is "actually stable", because it's "unstable" from the perspective of Debian, not from a subjective, individual experience.
Debian release cycles have a strong focus on stability, and for those situations where it matters, like running a production server, that is a pretty important feature. Just because your desktop never broke doesn't mean it's not "unstable", it's more of a disclaimer that if you put serious things on top of it and it breaks, that's much more on you because you chose to go against maintainer advice.
For me personally, with exception of the Enterprise Linux family (Alma, Rocky etc.), there's no Linux distribution I'd rather run on a workhorse, production, long term deployment server than Debian.
[assuming you're using best practices etc] having your users log into a centralized VPN means that you've got all your different on-prem/DC services and services all in well-designed tightly-controlled VLANs with pinhole access network ACLs between them. additionally, you've got your VPN users in tightly-controlled role-specific VPN groups in their own IP pools that are again additionally tightly-controlled via network ACLs. all of this takes time to setup, run and monitor. unless you run a tight ship with automation helping many of these steps and layers, it can be a logistical nightmare. maybe that's GP meant.
That's funny because it's about installing Office 97, and if you used Office 97 today you probably wouldn't miss anything from 27 years of new versions. So the use case is still there!
As long as you don't use their exclusive DBaaS, moving away is easier than from other places, as egress traffic is free.
The user experience though, stuff of nightmares...