[iterminate]

I'm generally sympathetic to the difficulties of building a sustainable business around open-source project stewardship but I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion that they were justified in this decision. The decision they've made here isn't actually much to do with the open-source project at all, and in fact, commercial products with no open-source component go through this every day. For example, every cloud provider nowadays offers "s3-compatible" storage which is built on the back of the work Amazon did early on. Currents (and co.) have taken what is effectively the Cypress protocol and built their own compatible product for it.

The benefit of being a commercial operation responsible for open-source project stewardship is that you have a low-cost marketing engine and most importantly you're able to set the direction of the project, you're able to operate at the cutting edge, delivering the best service to end users, in a way that others cannot. For example, the work Chromatic do in stewarding Storybook means their service is by far the best paid Storybook service and the alternatives (regardless of price) are rarely worth it.

If you're executives at the commercial arm of an open-source project and you're incapable of differentiating so much so that what Cypress are doing here makes sense, you've failed in your duty to shareholders and employees and should be removed. Cypress aren't protecting employee's livelihoods, they're protecting the executives in the short-term at the expense of the employees in the long term. They've bought their employees at best another 6 months with this.

There's examples of egregious commercial behaviour in open-source (like Amazon's situation with elasticsearch) where it's pretty easy to moralise about reselling free software with very little value-add. However, the entire internet is built on people taking concepts and ideas and iterating on them: building a product that is compatible with Cypress is worlds apart from ripping off the Cypress commercial arm.

I think the decision probably makes sense for the executive team at Cypress at this point in time: the writing is on the wall for the company, and taking this drastic action gives them a little more breathing room to somehow salvage a future... but the justifiable decision is to actually use their very advantageous position. If Cypress are threatened by Currents, that's embarrassing for the leadership, because they started a marathon at mile 20 while Currents was still sat at mile marker 0.