on the individual level you can make mistakes. on an organizational level allowing this kind of mistakes means they discussed it and nobody found a problem with it. its a sign of disfunction.
Not my problem, and not a valid problem in the first place, and not the charge against them.
There are an infinite number of ways to make enough money to survive.
You can sell your work honestly without artificially witholding work that is already done so you can sell it a million times over, and get people to do it by artificially creating or at least artificially preserving a pain point and randsoming the salve.
That is not simply doing work and paying for that work.
If a thing is at all useful enough that anyone even wants to use it, then there are a million businesses that would love to pay you for expert installation and training and support of perfectly free software.
Ahh but that doesn't scale. You can sell your time to a few people and live very very well, but you can't sell your time to a billion people.
No one is "trying to survive" in this story. What a strange and incredible thing to even try to say.
It's almost like they probably should have figured out something so important by now. I guess they didn't have a plan B after they didn't get bought out. Sucks to suck.
Right up there with removing all nuance from a discussion and attacking a strawman...