[Chatting]

This is unethical.

I don't necessarily blame the developer for selling: I understand that some offers are difficult to refuse. But I absolutely do blame him for being dishonest to his users and contributors.

No one was told about this. People only found out about the sale by chance, because someone noticed that the Play Store listing details were changed and made a post on Reddit.

When confronted on GitHub, the developer gave evasive answers, citing vague and unrelated issues, such as "the quality of the Android ecosystem dropping".

I assume a lot of users bought these apps with the expectation that they were not infested with ads, data mining, dark patterns, etc. Most people have automatic updates enabled, and they will get all of the above shoved into their face before they can prevent it.

The value of these acquisitions is determined almost entirely by the userbase. The developer was only able to get this deal because of his users. At the very least, they deserved to be treated with some basic amount of respect.

[JeremyNT]

I once found a nice open source ambient noise generator on F-Droid. Fully local, offline.

One day the developer decided to switch to a pay SaaS model. They updated the open source app to be a thin client for their web service.

Surely many existing users on the play store found quite a surprise when they updated!

F-Droid at least provides a little protection here, with the independent builds and easy downgrades, and if the community is big enough you see forks appear. But sadly this kind of cashing in is always going to be a risk with open source software in app stores.

[dmvdoug]

So, to be fair, the thing about his displeasure with Android was in response to somebody asking if he would be involved in helping maintain a fork that’s being set up. He said no and gave his Android reasons. Which to me sounds like he’s literally getting out of Android development.

Now, I didn’t read all the way to the bottom of that thread and GitHub, but no one really seem to ask him why he didn’t give notice of to anybody. The comments were either like, no, don’t do it, or we’ve gotta fork this. They weren’t really about how he has handled the issue.

[juunpp]

Doesn't the GPL protect third-party contributions in ways that liberal licences do not? I think the author might have trouble re-licensing third-party GPL contributions under a proprietary licence, but IANAL.

[mcpackieh]

From what I gather, the author isn't re-licensing the code but is selling their copyright and brand (trademark?) to Zipo, who in turn will probably try to re-license it (without permission from other contributors) or will simply choose to violate the license.

[juunpp]

The latter part is not legal as far as I know, which then makes the first part moot. Unfortunately, I cannot find a good reference for this from the FSF's website, I am going off of memory. But I believe this matter is precisely one of the reasons not to use a liberal licence, or be wary of contributing to liberally-licensed projects.

[mcpackieh]

If all the other contributors had signed over their copyright to the original author, then the author or whoever he sells the copyright to could release future versions under a different license. Copyright assignment is often done (for instance, with official GNU projects) because it makes license enforcement easier. However it also makes re-licensing easier. As far as I know, other contributors to these projects never signed over their copyright, so the original authors can't sell that code to this company in the first place. Since the company doesn't own that code, they can only use it under the terms of the GPL.

With liberal licenses (BSD, etc), the license permits distributing binaries without releasing the code so re-licensing isn't even necessary. Any corp can take the code and make it proprietary in full compliance with the original license.

[juunpp]

Makes sense, thanks for clarifying. Also, I take it whatever adware they want to add is proprietary, so that won't be compatible with the GPL'ed code anyway. The legal basis for this sellout seems very thin to me altogether. I think the company's only option would be to remove every single third-party contribution?

[type0]

ads don't have to proprietary

here's one example of ads in FOSS https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/issues/779

[dun44]

With BSD, anyone can take the code and build a derivative product, under whatever business model, open source or not.

GPL, on the other hand, can make it possible for a corp to buy the project and effectively prevent further development, like it happened with MySQL.

[brightlancer]

> GPL, on the other hand, can make it possible for a corp to buy the project and effectively prevent further development, like it happened with MySQL.

That's not correct.

All of the MySQL GPL code was and is free for continued development. The company has no right to stop you or me from continuing to work on it. MariaDB was forked from MySQL and continues to be GPL licensed.

How do you think the GPL "effectively prevent further development"?

[juunpp]

Explain? Isn't MariaDB the fork of MySQL that derived from that sellout? Oracle can't prevent further development of it or any other forks. The GPL is doing its job here.

[matkoniecz]

Note that https://www.patreon.com/tiborkaputa is up and collecting money, the same for funding requests at https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion

[wesapien]

This also compounded by getting users to buy his "pR0" version that he says will be free ads and your data private forever

[aaomidi]

The devs also think that they’re gonna get to relicense the code.

What a bunch of idiots.