Now, say, instead of making the new version of his program cease to function for everybody entirely, he decided that the new version of his program was no longer going to be free, and if users wanted to utilize the newest version they must pay a fee. Say he introduced code instead that checked if a license was purchased for the software, and if so the program works, and if not the program halts. Would this have been considered a "malicious" act as well?
Price increases can cause a loss of customers; that's fairly well understood, I think.
I don't think it would be seen as malicious, because:
- People could fork from the previously-free edition
- People should generally be understanding of (even if not in agreement with) the desire to make money from their labour
For a FOSS project to attempt to engage with existing investment/company/private equity structures could be fraught thought, I'd expect (one route to enabling a revenue model).
Are those groups wise to -- and aligned with -- the mindsets and opportunity envisioned by FOSS contributors?
I had an interesting issue with Nuget package manager. Authors of some open-source package we’re using changed their license from permissive MSPL into another one which only allows non-commercial use and also says “reserves the right to modify this Agreement at all times without notice”, LOL.
At some point, I pressed a button in visual studio to upgrade dependent packages if our software. The project it relatively large. It’s developed by a team of people over years, and has dozens of dependencies. The project builds a desktop software which doesn’t listen on any sockets or installs any services, security is not an issue, so I only pressing that button couple times a year. A few of these third-party libraries were automatically updated. I have built and tested the software, and called it a day.
It was mere luck I noticed the change of the license of that library before we built new public release of our software.
Not sure everyone agrees, but I think the responsibility is largely on Microsoft, not the package authors. When a package author changes their license to be more restrictive, I would expect Visual Studio should stop upgrading the dependency, and show the developer doing the upgrade some message box with human-readable error text, and links to old and new licenses. That didn’t happen, it was no popups, no messages, nothing I could possibly notice and react.
Lunar 3 was free and open source, then a very high effort upgrade had to happen because the M1 CPU needed different low level logic for controlling monitors, so I made Lunar 4 paid.
I still keep Lunar 3 as a free download right on the front page, and its source code is untouched in the lunar3 branch (https://github.com/alin23/Lunar/tree/lunar3)
Most people were happy to pay and support me for the new app, but inevitably there were some very rude messages because some users felt entitled to getting the upgrades free forever.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, it's your work and your time and you should ask to be compensated for it if you need the money.
Somewhere there lies your answer.