People should understand from the outset that open source contributions from for-profit companies must benefit that company.
For VC-backed companies -- or anything else where it's spend now, profit later -- the bait-and-switch is practically inevitable.
(Or, of course, the company can simply stop contributing, either from going out-of-business, or pivoting, or being acquired, etc.)
If you're considering building long term on oss from a for-profit company you should count on having to pay in the future. You should believe you have a decent understanding of their business model so you have an idea of how much you might need to pay. Of course that's usually very difficult for VC-backed "spend now, pay later" companies, so you might be best off avoiding them for anything long-term or foundational unless you think you can bear to switch, possibly on short notice.
I generally agree with your point. Over the years of being responsible for technology stack choices, I've come to apply one rule of thumb on OSS projects: is the project a core competency of the company behind it or not. For example, Github might open source their language detection library or Shopify might open source some frontend development project. These are not core competencies of Github or Shopify. Their business is somewhere else.
However, if I start a business and open source my core competency, with or without VC money, I will have to turn a profit or die, which leads to such outcomes, from MinIO to Hashicorp.
For VC-backed companies -- or anything else where it's spend now, profit later -- the bait-and-switch is practically inevitable.
(Or, of course, the company can simply stop contributing, either from going out-of-business, or pivoting, or being acquired, etc.)
If you're considering building long term on oss from a for-profit company you should count on having to pay in the future. You should believe you have a decent understanding of their business model so you have an idea of how much you might need to pay. Of course that's usually very difficult for VC-backed "spend now, pay later" companies, so you might be best off avoiding them for anything long-term or foundational unless you think you can bear to switch, possibly on short notice.