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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

> But if you decide to open source something, keep your promises, no matter what.

I don't understand the sentiment of "once something is OSS, it has to be so forever". They owe you what exactly? More of their free time & money to hold up something you call a "promise" but is just their choice of license made many years ago?

They are being reasonable about it, you still get the source, you can still use it for free on a revenue < $25M. Companies making significant amounts of money now have to pay for it, instead of freeloading.

Its fine to spend your nights and weekends on passions projects when your young, its also fine to demand money for shouldering much of its development when said project grows large many years later and you have obligations towards your family. Its called being an adult.

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> I don't understand the sentiment of "once something is OSS, it has to be so forever". They owe you what exactly?

If I contributed to the project, I did so under the premise of the LICENSE that was active when I contributed. If I didn't like OSS, I wouldn't have contributed to a OSS project. Them changing the license is a middle-finger to me as a contributor.

> Its fine to spend your nights and weekends on passions projects when your young [...] Its called being an adult

With all due respect, fuck you. Equaling "open source" to "young people can waste their time" and "software needs to earn money" to being an adult is a really shitty opinion to put out there.

Me (40+ years old) and many others do open source because we want the world to be about more than just money. Just because you cannot understand that nor want the same thing, doesn't mean that we're wrong and you're right.

> If I contributed to the project, I did so under the premise of the LICENSE that was active when I contributed. If I didn't like OSS, I wouldn't have contributed to a OSS project. Them changing the license is a middle-finger to me as a contributor.

No, you contributed under the premise of the LICENSE that was active when you contributed _and the CLA they made you sign before they accepted your PR_, which said that they're allowed to change the license later on if they feel like it. If you think that the company changing the license for future versions is a middle finger, you shouldn't be contributing to projects that make you sign CLAs.

Sorry, I was responding directly to the claim ""once something is OSS, it has to be so forever". They owe you what exactly?" without thinking about Lightbend in particular. If you sign a CLA saying they can change the license later on if they so wishes, they are of course free to do so.

How is that morally different from your contribution being used by non-contributing companies to turn profit.

The existing codebase stays OSS, and can be forked. The work they put in starting now, is going to be proprietary for three years.

It feels like a stupid change anyways, as companies can just keep using the old OSS version.

Whatever you contributed is still available as OSS (the previous version with the old license). Just fork the project and compete with them if you think you can do it better. Lightbend seems to think they can't keep developing OSS Akka in a way that would make them money and thus the change.

You contributed under the Apache “LICENSE”, which allows them to do exactly what they did. This is hardly a subtle detail, it’s one of the major characteristics of the Apache license.

If you did not like this, you could have chosen to only contribute to projects whose licenses do not permit this, e.g. those licensed under GPL.

Were you unaware of this?

Of course they are allowed to change the license to whatever they want, or start adding bugs on purpose to the software if they so wish, anything is possible with the various copyleft licenses.

It's legal, yes. If it's nice towards contributors of past versions, is another thing.

No, that's exactly my point, Apache is _not_ a copyleft license.

Under the GPL, you cannot change the license in a subsequent version. You must continue to license any derivative works, including subsequent versions, under the GPL. If someone wants to ensure that the projects they're contributing to remain open-source, they should limit their contributions to GPL projects!

The Apache license does not require you to license derivative works under the same license.

This is why people have strong opinions about different licenses, because some of them provide stronger guarantees than others. If someone ignored these "details" and is now disappointed that they didn't understand what it meant, I don't think that's anyone's fault but their own.

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