Previously LGPL, now re-licensed as closed-source/commercial. Previous code taken down.
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Does the LGPL really allow that or did they make all the contributors agree to allow their code to be relicensed?
Previous versions licensed under LGPL will remain licensed as such. The current maintainers have no obligation to contribute distributing the older versions, but they aren’t permitted to prevent others from distributing it or modifying or doing anything else that was permitted by the license.
And, yes, to change from GPL/LGPL to another license you would need all of the contributors to consent, or to rewrite the parts that were contributed by anyone who doesn’t agree with the license change. Since it looks like there only one contributor according to the GitHub page, this probably wasn’t too difficult.
Was there only ever one contributor? There’s only one now, but all the old commits have been removed.
They apparantly had a police of not accepting merge requests or even code snippets.
Ahh huh, I wonder if this was the plan the whole time then
Hmm that’s a scary conspiracy. Seems like checking that there are at least a handful of contributors needs to be part of adding new dependencies.
deleted by creator
Although rug-pulls like this are dubious to say the least, neither should FOSS contributors be hauled over the coals simply because, to justify continuing to commit more and more time to a project. they need to generate some kind of revenue. If more FOSS advocates donated reasonable amounts of money to the projects they use, this kind of bollocks would be much less frequent, and the long term stability of projects would increase dramatically. Sadly, way to many people donate nothing. And way too many companies, as well.
This is so sad. I’m especially bothered about the force push to change history. This was a great library. Now I guess it’s time to either use the fork or find something else.
The history change was probably to avoid violating the LGPL. If any contributors don’t agree with the change (or you don’t want to do the onerous task of getting consensus as required) you should remove their contributions from the work you make closed source as the contributions still come under LGPL until the original author consents to the change.
Or at least that’s what people said here.
That’s incorrect in that you have to remove the contributions from source code or get permission. Rewriting git history doesn’t get permission or remove history. It just hides it.
Booo
I hear mojo a callin
If previous code was lgpl then anyone with a git repo can simply reupload it to git and continue the project under a different name.
To whomever owns this project: fuck you for taking the work of multiple people and just taking it for yourself.
Bruh. This is why I hate all the open source license that are not GPL. Are not free software. I am not bother to pay for it. But I am bother to not see the code :(
Only to a certain extent.
The problem is that a lot of software is very complex and requires full-time development/maintenance. It’s simply not possible to work on stuff for free unless this is just a hobby and you can sustain yourself with a main job.
The main thing I have a problem with this instance is the following sequence of events
- The developer licensed it as LGPL.
- They did not accept ANY contributions to the code.
- The project became popular enough for people to post about in the fediverse (quite popular then, I guess)
- They got donations for their work, but apparently it was not enough.
- They removed the project from being accessible and moved to a paid only model.
This tells me:
- Their intention all along was to abuse FOSS community for popularity, traction, clout and free testing by people who are also doing this stuff in their free time.
- They got donations, but for whatever reason it was not enough for them. => Were they expecting to make retirement level income from their project which is in a crowded segment?
Yeah if you really care about FOSS you should use GPL and not MIT BDS and a multiple license. Because at the end of the day the code can became close source in just a second. That is the point of GPL and the Foss. I am willing to pay with money because I can. But I am not willing to pay with trust.
What? The GPL would have offered no more protection for this exact scenario than the LGPL (or any other license for that matter).
