[dist1ll]

I feel conflicted.

The FOSS label is an extremely powerful statement and draws in lots of users. To switch the license is very poor taste in my opinion, and not much different from a bait-and-switch.

It should be a maintainers responsibility to be very clear about their goals for this project. I feel that they jumped the full-time gun too quickly, and now users will be paying for it

[googlryas]

The code he developed will still be licensed under the old license, just going forward new changes won't be. You can fork it right now and keep a FOSS version if you'd like.

But it's not a bait and switch because we don't have a right to his future work under whatever license we like. Imagine the developer was hit by a bus right now, or became a cloistered monk. Same difference.

[lmm]

> But it's not a bait and switch because we don't have a right to his future work under whatever license we like. Imagine the developer was hit by a bus right now, or became a cloistered monk. Same difference.

If he takes people's donation money with the implicit or explicit promise that he's going to make a good-faith effort to continue working on the code, he has a moral obligation to do that IMO. Getting hit by a bus wouldn't be his fault, but choosing to abandon it to become a monk would be.

[iudqnolq]

> If he takes people's donation money with the implicit or explicit promise that he's going to make a good-faith effort to continue working on the code

In the absence of clear language I think it's unreasonable to expect a small amount of money to create an infinite obligation.

I'd expect a donation to be spent on development expenses, including time. I'd expect the developer to continue developing until the money runs out, or return the remaining money.

Imagine you have GitHub sponsorships providing $2,000/month. You use that money to cover all your expenses and work on OSS full time. Everyone stops donating today. Surely you'd get a job and stop working on OSS full time?

[lmm]

Sure, I think you don't have an obligation to work forever. Equally I think your moral obligation is not zero. "continue developing until the money runs out, or return the remaining money" sounds like a good answer.

[josephcsible]

It is a bait and switch, because he will still be still maintaining the software, but under a proprietary license. If he stopped maintaining it altogether (as in your "imagine" examples), then you'd be right that it wouldn't be a bait and switch.

[bobbylarrybobby]

What’s the switch? You have everything he’s done up to this point as FOSS. You could continue to develop it yourself, if you wanted. If you were using the software expecting free updates into perpetuity… that’s on you.

[layer8]

We shouldn’t think of it as a bait-and-switch if nothing was promised. The license applies to the current version. It doesn’t represent a commitment for future versions, and shouldn’t be taken as such.

[tomcam]

He tried something. He failed. Sometimes the license has to change even if we don’t want it to. Having the project around in altered form is better than not having it at all.

[dessant]

It's almost as if one is expected to keep sharing until their last day, without ever being entitled to change the terms of sharing.

[glitchc]

"Terms subject to change without notice."

If commercial entities can do it, so can the FOSS community.

[lifthrasiir]

Not exactly, because the software already licensed under an old license (which is the only "terms" applicable here) will stay fine.

[glitchc]

No it won't. It will be unsupported. Bugs and security vulnerabilities will accrue making it less and less valuable over time. It's funny how the very people whose livelihood depends on perpetual software growth and maintenance are the first ones to claim FOSS is okay stuck at a particular version. Every company keeping their stack stuck on the permissive license is risking a log4j style event in the future.

[lifthrasiir]

That's true, but also very much independent from whether a once-free software went non-free or not. Log4j was absolutely a free software when that event happened. The same thing would happen if the maintainer don't see any more value in maintaining an FOSS software (including but not limited to monetary reasons) and stops doing so.

[cesarb]

> It will be unsupported. Bugs and security vulnerabilities will accrue making it less and less valuable over time. [...] are the first ones to claim FOSS is okay stuck at a particular version. Every company keeping their stack stuck on the permissive license is risking a log4j style event in the future.

Your example shows the opposite of what you intended to show. It was the people stuck at a particular version of log4j (the old unsupported log4j 1.x branch) who avoided the vulnerability, while the ones who kept up-to-date with the maintained log4j 2.x branch were vulnerable. And it also shows the power of a permissive license: for those stuck at the older log4j 1.x branch, which had been abandoned by its maintainers, there's now a fork by someone else (https://reload4j.qos.ch/) which is being maintained.

[HALtheWise]

That would be a much more relevant concern if we were talking about a database or library or something. In this particular case, mold is a linker, and I think people here are dramatically overestimating how likely there are to be security vulnerabilities in a linker or how little work is needed to keep it working at it's current level.