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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

Their old CONTRIBUTING file <https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI/blob/1fa911cafee6...> said:

> Pull requests are not being accepted for the project. This includes sending code changes via other means than "pull requests". Plainly put, code you send will not be used.

> I don't mean to be ugly. This isn't personal. Heck, I don't know "you",the reader personally. It's not about ego. It's complicated. The result is that it allows me to dedicate my life to this project. It's what's required, for whatever reason, for me to do this. That's the best explanation I have. I love and respect the users of this work.

It's obvious in hindsight that those reasons were a bald-faced lie, and the real reason was exactly that he could legally do this rug pull.

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It's not really a "rug pull" to simply take your own open source code off a site at your own discretion.

Nothing's been taken away, it's just been obfuscated. Foolishly. Definitely petty, as another commenter says.

It is a bit of an own goal from the perspective of trust, though; it's going to kill any hope he has of succeeding with the project.

How is "I'm relicensing this program from LGPL to a proprietary subscription, and making (futile) attempts to delete all copies of the old licensed version" not a rug pull?

Exactly because he can't relicense retrospectively.

Nothing has been taken away. The rug has not been pulled out from anyone; they just have one less guarantee about their future development. They still have the repo they cloned and the right to distribute it.

He's shot himself in the foot, guaranteeing a competitive fork, and guaranteeing code mirrors will spring up everywhere.

Given that he apparently never accepted PRs, I don't really see anything has changed; it might even be for the better if it essentially validates a fork.

There is one point on which I would reach some agreement: he should consider returning any large donations made in the last few months if he's done no further development on V4, mind you, or convert those donations into lifetime licences. Those people might otherwise feel a little tug of the rug under their feet. Nobody else really has a right to, and they might benefit from a community-maintained fork.

But it sounds like he might not have had any large donations anyway.

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