Comment by btown

For some context on that infamous classname, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/13515403 and https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/

As the commenters above note, the "upgrade" to AGPL was both highly profitable to Lowagie and caused many to shift to an open-source fork.

IMO forks are the great leveler; if your brand strength and your ongoing investment in engineering + community make a license shift viable (and if you retain the trust of your contributors) then everybody wins... but if you make a license shift and just rest on your laurels, forks will destroy your value. I don't know enough about the history to know what happened in this case, but based on the successful exit, I imagine it's somewhere between these two extremes.