[pjungwir]

If this becomes a trend I'm afraid it will hurt business use of all open source software, since companies will never know if their dependencies are going to suddenly start charging money. Even though you can use the old versions, getting stuck on outdated libraries is a big problem for a lot of projects, where you try to stay up-to-date. It feels like we are only recently at a point where managers and lawyers will permit building on open source software and not force you to use Microsoft and Oracle. But if every repo could be free today and $90/mo tomorrow, will that change?

[microcolonel]

> But if every repo could be free today and $90/mo tomorrow, will that change?

Well, it's not "free today and $90/mo tomorrow", it's just that they're not going to maintain the one that's under the free license. You don't suddenly have to pay $90/mo for what was already distributed.

It's a fair attempt to make some money, but this license is odious and bizarre. I don't think there's a trend for this.

[skissane]

> since companies will never know if their dependencies are going to suddenly start charging money

It is more of a risk for some open source projects than others. Look for example at React – I very much doubt Facebook will try to relicense it into a commercial product, simply because they are not in the business of selling software and probably don't want to get into that business. But, compare that to many small companies who have a product (such as a development tool or database or whatever) and they offer an open source version and a commercial version with extra features–there is a much bigger risk they might decide their open source offering is harming their commercial one, and therefore should be discontinued.

Similarly, an open source project run by a single individual or small community is more likely to be closed up than one run by a large community. On the other hand, a project run by a single individual is likely to be a smaller code base, and hence more feasible to fork or maintain in-house.

So, I think businesses should be aware of this risk, but should evaluate that risk for each open source dependency independently.