Comment by evanelias

> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it

I would wager that an overwhelming majority of people who choose FOSS licenses do so without ever making any grandiose claims about the betterment of humanity. Yet upon any suggestion of a license change, if the project is popular, they get attacked for being a lying scheming rug-puller all the same.

> that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy

Why do you automatically assume they're a liar, and not just someone whose circumstances or opinions changed over time? Or just responding to changes in the competitive landscape or business cycle?

If you release FOSS software, it seems your only socially acceptable options are to keep future versions FOSS forever, or abandon the project entirely if/when your circumstances no longer permit FOSS development. How is that state of affairs beneficial to anyone?

> Proprietary software is fine.

I agree, but our industry also has a vocal minority of open source purists, who treat anything using non-OSI-approved licenses as toxic waste -- even software using a quite generous source-available license.

For B2C software, that situation is manageable: the purists simply won't touch the software, and will loudly pan it on forums like HN, but plenty of others will try it if it's useful.

But for B2B software, it's more problematic, since there are enough open source purists out there that most tech companies employ at least a few, influencing corporate policy about acceptable licenses. If a new B2B software product has no OSI-approved FOSS edition at all, the purists tend to majorly tank adoption, which hugely impacts the business viability of the product.

So if you're bootstrapping a new B2B infrastructure product that doesn't lend itself to SaaS, what license do you pick? If you go FOSS, you severely limit the economic viability of your own work. Or if you go non-FOSS, you severely limit adoption, which then has the same outcome.

> That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step

If it was just about money/payments, then non-OSI "source available" licenses would be far more popular, especially ones that allow the software to be used free/gratis for all situations that don't directly compete with the software creator. Yet instead the widespread attitude towards these licenses seems to be far more mixed. How do you explain that phenomenon?