Maybe this is the case, but why is your presumption of entitlement to free labor of others the assumed social contract, the assumed "moral" position, rather than the immoral one?
Why is the assumed social contract that is unwritten not that you can have the free labor we've released to you so far, but we owe you nothing in the future?
There's too much assumption of the premise that "moral" and "social contract" are terms that make the entitled demands of free-loaders the good guys in this debate. Maybe the better "morality" is the selfless workers giving away the product of their labor for free are the actual good guys.
That's not what a social contract is you are thinking of a legal contract, something very different. A social contract is by definition, implicit rather than explicit.
It was not expectation when they started, did a lot to lure many into the ecosystem. When you release it free, wait for the momentum to build, then you cut off, it is something else. And the worse is they did it in a very short time. Check out elasticsearch, the same route but did not abandon the 7 release like this.
I know all about ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Redis, etc. Yes, what they did sucks. No, it doesn't make the maintainers bad or anything. It's still on the user to know that anything can happen to that spiffy project they've been using for a while, and so be prepared to migrate at any time.
