I came across this a few months ago when I was evaluating open source installer options for my own …

Isn't it just a clear statement that they aren't going to give commercial users support for free? I know you are saying it isn't clear, but your quote literally includes the statement "While the source code is freely available under the terms of the LICENSE".

Start-ups and smaller companies that are extremely cash strapped are willing to take an opensource project, compile it themselves, turn it into deployment artifacts and manage that whole lifecycle. There is a threshold where paying someone to manage and certify the lifecycle of tools is more valuable than keeping it in house. This is pushing those enterprise customers that are just using and updating binary releases because they don't want to take on the compliance risks of first-party support to pay for official versions.

I think they're trying to say that if you are talking to them on behalf or a revenue generating entity, then you better pay them to talk to them about the project. feels like a pay to interect iff one of the parties interacting is a profit making entity

> I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just a difficult concept to succinctly explain in a short paragraph. It is challenging to describe the concept succinctly, especially as there are lots of varied expectations people have about how Open Source projects work. I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to improve the text.

If you read the comments on the GitHub issue, the guys seems more than reasonable. My understanding is that they want you pay if you are making money. My guess if you are just a one-person show with a just-started product, they probably won't care much. Here is their sponsorship page: https://github.com/sponsors/wixtoolset