Regarding the latter sentence, that's if you treat it like a service. If you want active support as well as developers to work on it constantly, someone has to pay them. If, however, you've evaluated the product and are happy with it as-is, and consider that you're literally a community of coders if you were to want some tweaks, then there cannot be an enshittification arc because you can use the current version indefinitely under the current terms
I find it strange that people treat open source software like a free service. It's a free product, usually stating explicitly that "there is no warranty express or implied" in full caps. Any future improvements they release for free are worth celebrating, but not an entitlement they might price you out of by becoming "shit" all of a sudden
I'm plenty familiar with Open Source and do contribute as well. But I would also be paying for Zulip if we were to move the company to it.
I think you missed my meaning.. Mattermost is open core and recently removed things from their community version. Also, it's really not cheaper given the features I need, so my concern is that I'm just jumping providers to another company that'll eventually pull the same rug. I like and want to contribute to Zulip to avoid that problem but am not sure if the product experience will work for my particular non-technical users.