Comment by YetAnotherNick
2 years ago
It goes both ways. Crowd blame the maintainer if they change the license for the future updates. So it makes sense to blame the crowd if they want the updates for free.
But I agree with you. Open source projects shouldn't have any obligation to listen to the people if they change the license. Even if they intentionally bait and switch, the users should only expect the current version to be open source and shouldn't expect free updates for life.
Yes, if it's open source then users don't have any right to expect that it'll be maintained by someone, but if a project deliberately uses the bait and switch trick to get people to start using the project when it's open source in the hope of trapping them, then that's clearly manipulative and ruins trust in other open source projects.
Why? All they are claiming is that current version is open source and will remain open source. How is it different than stopping maintaining it altogether?
Because they released it as open source purely to lure people in and get them using it enough so that switching away would be difficult for them.
If they're up-front with people and mention that it'll be open source up until a time of their choosing, after which subsequent versions will be proprietary, then I don't see a problem and no-one's getting tricked.
When I'm choosing an open source tool to use, then I want to know whether it's under current development or is more or less abandoned. If the author suddenly decides to stop maintenance for some reason, then that's acceptable because they weren't trying to trick me into selecting their tool over others, though I'd still be looking to either switch to a different tool or see if the project has been forked. It's about honesty.
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