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Comment by acoustics | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it.

What does bother me is when the projects pivot to claiming that users now have a moral obligation to financially support the project. There is a kind of dishonesty in this move.

It's not that a successful project "should be free", it's that its success depended on it being free. If they had said all along that they'd eventually ask users to pay, that would be honest... but then they wouldn't have seen much of that adoption in the first place.

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In my case, I never intended on my open source project becoming popular, it just did and I had to either abandon it or make it my job. I'm not sure where that falls in your judgement.

I suspect this is also the case for PHP though.

It's your project, to the extent that you own the copyright. You are free to switch the license on your project, etc. If anyone tries to shame you for this, you should pay no mind. (Edited to add that you are also free to abandon it, and you could do that with a clear conscience.)

Likewise, users are free to continue using open source software without payment or donation, to fork the project, etc. If anyone tries to shame them for this, they should pay no mind.

Why would you have to abandon it instead of just keeping on in your preferred pace? If anybody wants more rapid development they can fork it, not your problem.

Some people also have tried the paid new feature prioritization where it later lands for everyone. I think it worked in some projects but project must have been really good otherwise.

I mean: who doesn't want to work full time on their passion project? Especially when I'd just been made redundant, I feel most people would do the same.

Full time on passion project only makes sense if you're also getting paid a decent salary. Full time for a bunch of free loaders does not make sense.

Also it gets less fun when people start making demands of you and you have to deal with taxes and all the unfun stuff.

> I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it

It only bothers me when they try to claim their new license is open source or use misleading language when it isn't. Which seems to be what 90% companies doing that do.

People can do whatever they want with their intellectual property as long as they aren't lying about it.

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