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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

Glad someone is doing this. The author pulled a bait and switch and got away with it because the software wasn't really a community project to begin with. The switch happened right after I spent a good amount of time getting Aseprite's finicky build system to work so I could package it for a distro. If I had known the author was going to betray the users I wouldn't have bothered.

After that I learned about Grafx2, which is free and pretty featureful: https://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2

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Most open-source projects aren't "community projects" and "betray the users" is an interesting way to phrase "tried to get people to support the project, they by and large refused, and so he made it distinctly less optional".

You're better than that, man. This stuff goes both ways.

Well, I bought Aseprite while it was FOSS, and license was one of the reasons I chosen it instead of PyxelEdit. I wound't say I feel betrayed... more like disappointed.

Don't get me wrong--I bought it, too. But I'm not disappointed in the author. I am disappointed in the userbase that wouldn't put up to make it viable. Like I said, this stuff is a two-way street.

(This is also why I, for a project I'm about to release, am doing an OSS/commercial split with higher-end features not part of the OSS version. But my software is designed for enterprise use, and they're used to paying for things.)

People have contributed to the project under the original license terms. It's absolutely a betrayal to the contributors (and possibly illegal, requiring consent) to change the license terms from under their feet.

Did the community contributors assigned the copyright of their work to the original maintainer?

Yes, original Aseprite contributors sign CLA.

> After that I learned about Grafx2

Yeah, I also use GrafX2 – it's much smaller, much faster, and support more platforms than Aseprite! ;-)

Few weeks ago we discussed GrafX2 on HN[0] and on Reddit[1,2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17213761

[1] https://reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8hih45/sh_grafx2_25_rele...

[2] https://reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/8hifts/sh_grafx2_25...

Grafx2 is also very much like Deluxe Paint if that's your thing. Moving from Deluxe Paint IV to Grafx2 was pretty seamless for me for that reason.

I'll note that it's probably best to run an old release (the 2.3 version that ships with Debian is OK) or build from master at this point, because there were some bugs in the 2.5 release that I couldn't get over. The project maintainer is very active and quickly accepted my patches, though.

The software is also pretty interesting from a developer's perspective. It has basically grown organically for 20 years, originally starting out as a freeware closed source Deluxe Paint clone for DOS. The source code reflects this, and there is some low hanging fruit ripe for improvement.

> If I had known the author was going to betray the users I wouldn't have bothered.

I'm a FLOSS developer. I understand FLOSS development, ethics, and licenses. And I don't understand why you're casually referring to a change to a proprietary license-- a change I agree is for the worse-- as a betrayal of users.

What purpose is this supposed to serve?

I absolutely cannot categorize a developer asking to be paid for their work as "betrayal".

Being paid for work and turning free software into proprietary software are very different.

Nobody "turned free software into proprietary software". He released some free software, then later he released other non-free software. He also explained his reasoning[0] - that developing the project as FOSS wasn't working out, for specific reasons he goes into, so he needed to try something else.

Honestly, this kind of thing is the ugly side of FOSS culture. I get why you were hoping he'd continue under the old license, but the fact that he didn't is no grounds to say he betrayed people.

[0] http://dev.aseprite.org/2016/09/01/new-source-code-license/

Some of the author's reasoning amounts to arbitrary justifications. They have a section describing the difficulties of integrating contributors patches, suggesting they're unwelcome, which is quite the high-horse stance to take when people are going out of their way to contribute code to your project. The rant against Linux packaging betrays the author's position, in that they would prefer to spam the user with donation/payment links in the most obnoxious way possible.

For example, they claim "[Distributions] do not show who is the real developer of the application in a clear way" and "They do not show buttons/links/a simple way to contribute to the real developer of the program", but in reality all properly documented programs handle this themselves in one or more of their --version/--help output, the manual, and the interface. This is especially true for GUI applications, which typically have an "About", etc menu giving details. If the author neglected to document their program properly, it's no fault of the packagers. I have never had problems finding the upstream source and authors from properly documented packages.

The article also brings up improper association of a package with a given disto. This is partiality true (e.g. users reporting bugs upstream for outdated packages when they should be contacting the packagers), but largely such end-user ignorance has nothing to do with Linux distributions, and is applicable to all OSs.

The author's reasons are his own; arguing them with me doesn't get us anywhere. If you're suggesting that he doesn't really believe what he said and must have other motives, I can only say I find that very unlikely.

If he's the one who was putting the work in to the software, he has a right to ask to be paid for it, even if he previously was nice enough to give it away

It's still their software? And I imagine the reason it was turned into proprietary software is that they weren't getting paid for it.

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