Elliot Management, one of the activist investors of LP mandating this change have long been known to get their claws into "underperforming" companies and insist on strategy change that is anti-free, anti-opensource. They did this around 2014 when I worked at Citrix and got them to sell off products not aligned with the flagship and close down some otherwise great software that was in part free-for-use-in-small-environments.

For e.g Citrix Xenserver (now Citrix Hypervisor) employed a lot of the founders and top talent contributing to the Xen project who being the hipster developer types fully buying into the free and open kinda felt betrayed that the ship they'd join to sail had changed course and eventually jumped ship - causing a brain drain to both the company and the upstream Xen. I wouldn't conclude this caused Xen to lose out to the competition - but the decaying cadence to the upstream project I'm sure was a contributing factor.

I've long since worked at Citrix and I hear now their product strategies and key offerings are "sensible", their valuations and stock prices are healthier, etc - which for the investors and employees is great but it appears this has come at a price of a less-free, less-open, insular monoculture. I don't particularly regard that as a success.