The amount of people who feel like they’re entitled to the previous code and are calling the license change scummy make me sick.
But you're not sick at the fact that they licensed it as LGPL just to get their product popular and then said "I got the eyeballs I wanted, time to milk this!"
This developer put their own free time into this project
When your code is open source the expectation is that you are sharing code with people for free so that the community can enjoy the work and hopefully you gain respect and popularity as your product matures and a lot of people utilize it. People might even fund you for your hard work if you become popular enough. Maybe a whole new product gets developed on top of your product and you become important. That's how a lot of successful open source projects work.
If you are entitled to quick success, we are entitled to our ideology around FLOSS.
they made sure to not accept anyone else’s code.
So they just wanted people to test their product and market them for free? Who's entitled here?
(Also that argument is not going to work in court when people sue them for violating LGPL terms)
and they understandably felt they deserve to be paid for their time
What about the compensation for people who beta-tested this product for free and recommended them to others?
But otherwise, you should really reflect on how you’re giving back to the people who make the tools you feel oh so entitled to.
The giving back part is increasing respect, popularity, and a community of contributors who will grow YOUR product for free. Don't act like this small project is a gift from God.
Also, the author literally didn't accept contributions. That just means they were looking for free marketing and eyeballs. As soon as it was convenient for them to pull the rug they did so without even thinking about the community. Who's the scumbag, you tell me?
