this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Programming
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I mean, if there are in fact many "people who contributed" then they should have no trouble forking the project at this point and continuing open source development of it. Their code and everything they contributed to is still open source. Nothing is being held hostage, no one is obligated to use the new proprietary closed-source version and the license they contributed under the terms of implies that it doesn't bother them that somebody else is using their contributions for their own internal purposes to create a proprietary version of it. That's explicitly allowed by the kinds of licenses they were using.
If there aren't many people who contributed then the problem is not the licenses, it's the fact that we depend way too much on people and companies donating development and maintenance effort to keep these projects afloat. The problem with donations is that they're not mandatory and if you try to make them mandatory then they're not a donation anymore. If it's no longer in the company's interest or economically justifiable to keep donating effort to the project then they won't. If the project can't survive that, then the license isn't the problem.