[BeefySwain]

Why does this keep happening? Do people not understand the implications choosing an open source license.in the first place? There are a million licenses, in fact you can just make your own one up! But when you choose a class of license the specifically allows commercial exploitation... you don't get to act wronged when it happens.

[pjmlp]

Two key reasons, they don't understand the implications, and many developers are cheapskates nowadays, they wouldn't have survived in old days until 2000's, where we paid for everything, or pirated it.

Somehow it feels great to be paid, to pay others for the tools, like in every other profession, not so much.

[Gud]

There was a lot of tools available for free in the the 90's. Both the BSDs and Linux existed.

[wkat4242]

Yes but the quality difference was bigger. And there were big gaps, eg until OpenOffice there was no decent alternative for MS Office. Most SDKs and IDEs cost money too (like the big visual studio still does)

[nine_k]

The license is still open source. There's only a branding requirement added. Not much unlike "you must retain this notice" in other open-source licenses, like the Apache license.

I frankly find LGPL more useful in cases like that, but it apparently does not work for some parties. Open-source + commercial licensing also looks like a good balance between keeping the community-developed code accessible to everyone, while allowing the parties who don't want to share to pay for the privilege.

[pjmlp]

That is my approach as well, downstream should get as much as they are willing to give upstream.

Nothing, then get nothing as well.

Pay the work of others, than freely charge as much as they feel like.

On my repos, the only stuff I have with ROCm licenses are forks from projects where the decision was not mine to begin with.

As time has proven, shareware and trials is a much better model if one intends to make a living from software, without having it lock behind SaaS walls, or hardware.

Even street performers got their work tools from somewhere and unless they were going around the scrap yard, it wasn't at zero cost most likely.

[robertclaus]

I think there's some selection bias. In my experience many folks that work on open source projects tend to lean more altruistic and good natured - so understanding the license doesn't mean expecting exploitation.

[pabs3]

Its deliberate, use a permissive/pushover license to get adoption, then rugpull once you have the userbase who are relying on you, then bathe your VCs in cash.

[sofixa]

You can't make such a claim without any backing. While undoubtedly it's the case for some, I strongly doubt everyone does it on purpose. It's just that orgs mature with time and realise their original naiveté.

Do you have any proof of that? Hell, are OpenWebUI even receiving VC funding?

[pabs3]

I was not referring to Open WebUI, but the general situation of license rugpulls, which is what I assumed the person I replied to was talking about.

[Kudos]

I would bet that there are VCs knocking down their doors right now, and that's what's sparked the license change.

[sofixa]

IMO there's a higher chance they're worried about bigger fish selling their project as a service than VC investment.