Am I the only person that thinks the recent JMWE change is sharp practise?

Question

I'm just imagining what our SaaS customers would say if we took away a required feature from SMARTset that they have been using since they got the product and said you can have it back, but you've now got to pay for it.

One could be forgiven for thinking that this, along with some of the other changes to the Cloud products (retirement of Bamboo for instance) are a direct result of having to "harvest shareholder value" now that Atlassian is a public company.

I have to say, it has really taken the shine off what I thought was a rather lovely company and product, built by developers for developers.

crf · Answer

(Another point worth mentioning is that public filings show the co-CEOs to control nearly 2/3 of the stock.  I expect that they are still very much their own masters and that any concerns regarding external shareholder influence over the company's direction probably aren't warranted. 
)

MattS · Answer

JMWE has been non-free in Server for a few years now. It makes sense to me that it has become a paid Connect add-on now.

Mind you, I do think that add-ons that are used by everyone (JSU, JMWE, Toolkit, etc) should be acquired and bundled with JIRA. Workflows without them are not configurable enough

crf · Answer

I would (personally) agree with you, but that's part of why I give the "I am not a product manager" disclaimer.  There were definitely technical reasons driving the decision to replace JMWE in Cloud. I can't speak to any decisions around making that replacement a paid enhancement, as I wasn't even aware of them.