This argument could be made after literally any move made by Autonomi and partners. One can always shrug the shoulders and say “well, it’ll bring more people”. Yeah, sure, could be true, but it’s not the only criterion.
I am not interested in “a popular network”, leading to a great payout for early adopters and investors, if it doesn’t fulfill certain ethical and technical criteria we were long told were not up for debate. We already have a popular network called the internet, and surely we’re after more than just recreating a similar thing but with a new name, and a tasty profit for us.
Proprietary software is fundamentally against community, learning, sharing, and is unethical, in my eyes. Business and/or profit-oriented folk will say that it’s either a good, or a necessary evil, but the history of the hardware and software space has shown repeatedly that software being proprietary gives companies and developers unjust power over users, which very few seem to be able to resist abusing.
There are other ways for individuals and companies to make their living.
So, yes, I’m very sceptical of this company, not as happy about this announcement as I would have been if the company were openly committed to open source, and am eager to hear more about the company’s reasoning for this decision, future plans with the software, etc etc. I really searched quite thoroughly on their blog for any info and couldn’t find any mention of it.