TheRealBrianF

"Now, in principle I don't mind paying for usage. But they promised self-serve signups before the limits are applied, which didn't happen - still no self-serve plans available. And the "contact us" pricing is too a large extent based on _popularity_ of the package. And not in a quantifiable way like "x GB downloaded", but rather "within the top 2% of usage" (by whatever hidden metric)."

-> This too is also factually incorrect. Self service rolled out on 10/1 along side the new updated limits that had a -30 day- grace period reset for everyone. So minimally you had 30 days before anything would be impacted...we are still at day 19 so no one has been impacted at all yet. The actual grace periods don't start until you go over the monthly limits so practically speaking it would take a few months before most things would have any impact.

"Then they started requiring paid plans for _all_ publishers that are not purely community projects. Doesn't matter how open it is, if it's backed by a commercial company, they require a paid plan."

This is factually incorrect and has been documented and discussed many times. The issue at hand is if something is open source vs "open source" but is really a free to paid go to market motion. This includes "open source" sdks that are only really used to build products against a paid commercial service.

We spend great time and care assessing each situation and discussing the results with the companies engaged with us to reach a fair conclusion.

If you think we got something wrong here, all you have to do is reach out and we are happy to walk you through what we see and drive to resolution.

--Brian (cofounder/CTO Sonatype)