It will be, "but".

The code is dual-licensed MIT and Apache. Meaning it's fully compatible with a privative fork, but also a free federated network could still survive.

For now, it seems like they are planning on developing extra features on top of the basic functionalities, not paywall basic features... but time will tell.

In any case, they seem to be led by people who jumped ship from Twitter before the Muskocalypse, so it's becoming kind of "the old time Twitter". Chances are, as Musk rides Twitter's popularity and inertia until fully turning it into a dystopian dictatorship propaganda machine, BlueSky will emerge to replace it as a slightly better iteration of what Twitter used to be.