Exactly, permissive licenses such as MIT allow for other people to do a rugpull and change the deal (pray I don’t alter it any further). With open source licenses the community can just fork.

That’s why I always pick AGPL for my projects. Then I can be certain that the code can be freed from greedy hands, and the actual users get all the value of the effort I put in.

VC funding really is making a deal with the devil, because you suddenly have a huge amount of cash, so the startup starts living large (hire more devs, run on expensive cloud infrastructure). But sooner or later they want their money back, plus interest; and few services are profitable, let alone that profitable. So the only thing that startups are usually capable of is to squeeze their users for all they’re worth.

Take a look at all the big startups and see:

• how long it took for them to be profitable
• how much VC funding they got until then

Companies need to pay that back and then some.

And don’t forget that VC’s see this as a perpetual investment, so your revenue must grow year after year, even if you’ve saturated the market.