This is why developers should AGPLv3 their personal projects from day one. Then others can't fork it under another license.
Even if they choose AGPLv3, the creator still maintains full freedom since they own the copyrights. They can make a commercial version if they want to. They can even relicense it under favorable terms to companies for a licensing fee. Everyone else must abide by the copyleft rules.
If they don't like it, let them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their own developers to make their own in house proprietary version.
That would be detrimental to "growth hacking" GitHub stars and gaining traction. One can't be paid without baiting users first.
It's rare but I've seen a number of projects over the years that have a hard copyleft license along with a line in the readme like "Want to use this with a different license? Send me an email and we'll sort it out"
I hate advertising so I don't even post about my projects anywhere unless some very specific conditions are met. People found and shared my projects anyway. They've made it to the front page of HN. I even gained a GitHub sponsor because of that. Not enough to turn my hobby into full time work but still awesome.
Only if they either refuse all contributions, require contributions to be made under an MIT license or similar (and then immediately relicense back to AGPLv3 before publishing), or require a CLA.
I'm all for personal projects to be licensed AGPLv3, but we must acknowledge that the moment you take others' AGPLv3 contributions, in practice you won't be able to do those other things.
> Good news is several Google and Apple engineers have volunteered to help with libxml2 and libxslt security issues, despite your effort to sabotage libxml2 users...
I mean, c'mon. He's carrying the world on his shoulders and people are just pointing fingers?
Also, this shows how evil corporations are. I can understand Apple, it's their culture to avoid GPL code and and committing code to any public project needs permission from everyone plus the campus cat, but Google, the apparently bastion of open source software is doing the same thing without any shame...
They have morphed into the next Microsoft AFAICS.
Despicable.
> maybe if you stop fixing things for free, perhaps somebody will suddenly be willing to pay you to do so
We should all remember that line every time we think about being generous or altruistic. He essentially called the maintainer a fool.
The maintainer has to pick a side and commit to it, and deal with the downsides. Alternatively, they may choose not to play.
Still, it looks like he maintained the library for a long time. He no doubt has more knowledge about the code base than outsiders. That ought to be valuable to corporations relying on the library and contributing security patches.
Why buy the cow if the milk is free? The license let's them use it without payment, and in a just world, they'd pay all the maintainers of libraries they use, but ours isn't a just world, and we need to formulate our strategies with that in mind.
Because he continues to work for free? Companies are amoral actors. They aren’t going to donate out of charity and if someone wants to give them free work they won’t say no