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Comment by TMM2K | Hacker News Reader

Godot is MIT licensed though, there's very little we can do to screw our users if we wanted to, which we do not :)

You could change the license for future versions and charge for said updates, for the market that godot targets that would be more a little screwing to them.

How long would it take for someone to take over the project (if ever).

And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork the project and development of a free version would continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven project, only for corporate-driven projects where a single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to all of the codebase.

The important distinction isn't who owns copyright. It is rather that there needs to be a community opposed to the license change and able and willing to do the work.

One could even imagine scenarios like an originally MIT-licensed software splitting into a commercial company offering commercial paid licenses, plus a community (or even the company itself) offering a GPL-licensed fork. Of course one could then still maintain an additional MIT-licensed fork, but if the rest of the community is happy with GPL and all the development just happens there, your MIT fork will "starve"...

While I'm able to understand your argument, IMHO the MIT license is not displaying that well. Community is plural, and fork with MIT could be like Windows: Closed source. End of the (fork) line.

Given the project itself is still strong, this might not be a problem, but then I see no reason why it has chosen it in the first place if not for that specific option.

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