> This makes it clear that they intent to ship under some alternative license, for a fee.
It makes it clear they intend to ship under the AGPLv3. What's wrong with that? They can change the license at a later date? Just fork!
> I wouldn’t consider any of this open source any more.
This is bananas; the AGPLv3 is extremely open source. And again, nothing prevents contributors from forking the code if Element closes it.
> What they are doing is a required step to pull the same stunt as terraform.
Didn't this result in the creation of OpenTofu? I haven't kept up and don't really have an opinion, but a cursory examination shows that their GitHub project has a gazillion stars [0].
> These folks are very unambiguously screwing over the community and making it sound otherwise.
They've contributed an enormous amount of work to try and move the state of the art in messaging forward in a way that respects users (being extremely open, implementing end-to-end encryption, embracing decentralization, etc). Your characterizations of them are super uncharitable. They owe you precisely nothing.