On the one hand, I'm supportive of people trying to make Linux on the desktop happen. On the other hand, a distribution aimed squarely and solely at developers doesn't seem like it's faithfully achieving that goal whatsoever, given that developers are the one group of people today that don't generally have a problem running Linux on the desktop. I would be far more excited to see this kind of money being poured into building a desktop for everyone else.

Rayfish, Tailscale, ZeroTier, Netbird etc are a different category of tool, designed to facilitate connectivity between you and your own pool of machines. They don't generally do much in the way of multi-hop routing, but rather they orchestrate VPN tunnels on top of another routed network (like the internet).

Reticulum would be better compared to Yggdrasil, cjdns etc as routing schemes for larger networks or true meshes, which can work independently of (and have no dependency upon) the internet.

Worse is that the unlicenced spectrum that is available is often so heavily encumbered with restrictions in many parts of the world. Wi-Fi HaLow for example, in ETSI regions, is limited to a paltry 14dBm EIRP in no wider than 2MHz channels and an unacceptably punishing duty cycle restriction in most cases that render it barely able to make a TCP connection (some mitigations exist that involve channel hopping on some products but nothing that works for things that require fixed channels, e.g. IBSS or 802.11s).

They know full well that if a successful legal challenge forced them to weaken parts of the OSA by removing service categories from scope, that they'd effectively open the floodgates to more challenges over other categories. The government and Ofcom don't want their precious work ripped up and the courts seemingly don't want to be responsible for doing so.

Whatever loophole they've found, it is practically a certainty that it will be addressed in the future.

In my mind this is missing the point. I am very pro-upgrade pricing because upgrade pricing actually forces the developer to think about what their users actually will pay for, or what improvements will make my workflow better, instead of just adding whatever fancy side-quest thing that you've decided I need today.

If users are asking for shiny new features and are willing to pay for them then fine. If we want refinements and are willing to pay for them then fine. If you want to optionally provide backend storage or backups or whatever then fine.

However, if my continued use of a specific version of your software has no continued cost to you, then be absolutely assured that I do not feel a moral obligation to keep on paying for it endlessly, nor should you assume that I do.