What the community probably didn't realise is that bills had to be paid in a tough situation. The price rise was not something they did out of greed but rather something of a last ditch effort to be profitable.
It wasn't a last ditch effort, the decision to change the pricing model happened 3 years ago. I think the community would have accepted a reasonable rise in price, it was the decision to mandate a minimum purchase of 5 developer licenses that sealed their fate.
Sencha's biggest failure was not building developer mindshare. If they wanted to sell commercial widgets, they should have done just that - their grid was pretty amazing and is probably the feature that led most people to discovering ExtJS in the first place. Instead they tried to sell an entire framework, with an entirely custom approach to building software. For that model to succeed, they should have made the framework itself free on a liberal open source license, and focused harder on selling services, extensions and tools around it. That way, it would have been embraced by more developers, widened the talent pool and encouraged their big corporate customers to expand the scope of its use in their companies.
