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by threecheese 16 days ago
This isn’t the controversy the title suggests. Taking the dev at their word, the measures are pretty reasonable; they asked for help maintaining, nobody stepped up, and so it needs funding somehow. You only need a license to access a release binary, and a paid license to access the Pro binary. Source code is open, compile it yourself to avoid. Some features went into the Paid tier: well, something had to. Commenters are mostly supportive.

The dev did yank the previous releases, which wasn’t maybe the wrong choice.
4 comments
dang 16 days ago
Submitted title was "AltTab.app makes free features paid, drops old releases". We've reverted it now.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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threecheese 5 days ago
Fair, and thank you for the nudge dang.
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MarsIronPI 16 days ago
Agreed. I was about to get up in arms about license violations and rugpulls, but this is neither. The code is still free and open source, just the builds are up for sale. This is literally a business model encouraged by the FSF. I hope the paid tier is successful and we see more projects adopt this approach when the time comes to pay the bills.
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rdmuser 16 days ago
The dev even offers free pro licenses to those who can't afford them:

"I shall add that if for some unfortunate reason you're not able to afford a license, just email me and i shall offer you one"

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Akronymus 16 days ago
> This isn’t the controversy the title suggests.

Yeah, I too am so sick of ragebait titles on HN by now, that my bar for contacting the HN mod team has become very low.

> The dev did yank the previous releases, which wasn’t maybe the wrong choice.

I'd argue that it isn't really dropped as all previous releases still seem to be accesible via the tags on the repo. You "just" have to compile it yourself. If the git history were dropped too, that'd be a different story.

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