You didn't deserve to be downvoted to hell and back. People deserve to be paid for their work, and without copyright law only mega-cap companies would ever be able to capture enough value from their work to survive.

People act like you're saying Disney should be able to hold a copyright on Mickey Mouse for over 100 years.

Calling it a "rug pull" when the creator of an open source project decides to stop giving away future work for free is a delusional level of self-entitlement.

(1) The previous releases are still open source. If you don't like it, fork the last free release and maintain it yourself.

(2) People deserve whatever the market is willing to pay for their work. See above.

Frankly, if D. Richard Hipp decided to stop giving away future versions of SQLite for free, I would be the first person to congratulate him for finally having the courage to put his foot down and say "my fellow committers and I deserve at least a few million dollars for 20 years of work making something that billions of machines rely upon."