Without BM & team BitShares is probably dead, and we can't blame them if they want to get paid for their work.
Yes. It was always the case that if BM and team announced "we are done with Bitshares, goodbye", then the project would be pretty much done for. Bitshares is not at bitcoin levels of adoption where many others could arise and carry on.
It has been quite worrying for months now that the price level of BTS is so low that it cannot pay a competitive developer wage to the team at these price levels and allowed dilution levels. (And more dilution is not a good answer either, it just hurts the price). Given this, the dev team securing funding is an excellent occurrence for Bitshares. When I read that in the announcement, my initial reaction was to gain a lot more confidence. This is a solution to a problem that Bitshares was facing: How are we going to retain the developers that we need to keep Bitshares growing to what it needs to be?
What are we giving up in order to get this developer funding WITHOUT having to dilute BTS for it? Well, it seems the developers could license some Bitshares technology features they develop to other blockchains.
How is this different form before? Previously any other blockchain could just steal bitshares code base.
Cryptonomex has given us the assurance that they will license to the Bitshares 2.0 blockchain. Other chains can't get that guarantee. Bitshares is in a privileged position here.
Yes, it is a risk that someone will try to poach the Bitshares devs and give them a ton of money to leave Bitshares, and that would suck for the project. That was ALREADY a risk. Nothing about that changed when they formed Cryptonomex. How is Cryptonomex different in this regard than I3 was?
We need Bytemaster and team's continued support of Bitshares in order for the project to be a success (or at least to be a success without a massive amount of pain and time waiting for someoen else to appear and step up to develop it). This fact was true in version 0.x and is true in version 2.0. If the newmine posts are the first time you woke up and saw this fact, then I guess you might be scared by it, but you should have understood this earlier.
Hopefully Bitshares will grow in time to reach a point where it could survive even the core team leaving. For this we need adoption! Lots more adoption. We need many more Bitshares companies to grow up in the ecosystem. Even then, hopefully Bytemaster and team will remain working on Bitshares as one of those companies - Cryptonomex. It would hurt to lose them, just as Bitcoin is hurt by the loss of Satoshi. (I think if Satoshi were still around, he could probably fix this bitcoin block size/TPS issue a lot more easily than the current team, because peopel would rally around his proposal).
Also, would the community really not want to accept Bitshares 2.0? I think there is no way at all that the community would want to stay with the slow 0.9 client, instead of moving to the 2.0 client that has been designed to fix the current problems. Some people act like this is being forced upon us, when actually this is what we have been clamoring for the devs to release for months. This is a silly complaint. Of course we want 2.0! We have desperately wanted these features for over 6 months! We want a fast web client, we want users to not need to sync a blockchain for 24 hours and use a memory hogging client to use Bitshares! And we want our potential 100000 TPS, that is amazing!
Just as the dot com bust in 2000 was very hard on all those new internet companies, the crypto bear makret of 2014-2015 has been very hard on all cryptocurrenncy companies. It has been a tough market to survive in, but Bitshares will survive, and this is part of that. Great job core team/Cryptonomex for managing to secure some funding so that the project can continue. Thank you for committing to license your works to the Bitshares blockchain. Please continue working on Bitshares and supporting it, forever! We, the Bitshares community, need you and your efforts, and will try to support you.
Hopefully we can grow the size of the community by 10x with the release of the new, much superior product, and then supporting you will become far easier.