[wyldfire]

> First of all, the usual suspects who rip off high quality open source projects have been known to just create a fork if the license changes (see Amazon and Elasticsearch). If you do this, you have to have the right license from the start.

It's probably not tested in court but I don't think Rui is obligated to continue to provide AGPL for old source code, just because he had before. Perhaps if you could determine when someone became a licensee, you could say that old/existing licensees can continue to use the old terms. But new licensees can be obligated to use new terms.

> I think the author should talk to the Linux foundation or the LLVM foundation and should get them to pay him a stipend or something. With this move he'll probably not help the situation much.

I doubt either of those organizations would fund Rui's work here. But it might be interesting to try and combine efforts with some of the incremental-compile/link ideas in Rust, Zig, and C++.

> Could it be that they just never even heard of mold?

This is likely the case. Maybe it would make sense to advertise it at conferences like OSSNA or similar.

[leni536]

> It's probably not tested in court but I don't think Rui is obligated to continue to provide AGPL for old source code, just because he had before. Perhaps if you could determine when someone became a licensee, you could say that old/existing licensees can continue to use the old terms. But new licensees can be obligated to use new terms.

Any old licensee that holds the source of the old code with the original AGPL license can distribute the code with the original license to anyone else. They have the license to do so.

That is anyone can just press fork on github, and keep distributing all the AGPL versions with the original license.