I hope they answer this ASAP. People in the Python community are already concerned that Astral is following the Embrace, extend, and extinguish playbook.
If they stop development on Ruff today, Ruff won't be useful anymore after a few new Python releases. If the maintainers of the tools that Ruff is replacing stop maintaining them, the whole Python community will be in a really bad place. So, there is reason to be cautious. Astral being transparent on how they plan to make money would be very helpful.
People could just fork it if that happens. Since the foundation of the tooling is solid, I 'm sure the community would rally around a fork that keeps it going.