It’s not great, I agree. They’ve shot themselves in the foot too, if they expect anyone to use one of their open source projects in future.
But we don’t know what their circumstances are. I don’t know how much maintenance is required that their users expect for free (or that stems from the considerable technical debt).
letting people get accustomed to using it, and then bam, relicensing for future versions so it isn’t redistributable any more.
Yes indeed. It’s another Rich’ move. But they own it, and it’s their decision. And if the alternative is a widely used library becoming unmaintained, or ‘heroic’ bankruptcy from their dedication to unpaid voluntary work (I’ve witnessed this in another sphere), what should the maintainer do?
Re: the ‘dichotomy’. Users will have to read the T&Cs and make their own decision.
The possibility of rug pulling is something any company, and indeed anyone, should consider when picking a new dependency. And also the reason why they should create their own fork, and their own backups, while the deps are still open source licensed.
The previous license was LGPL3, so users should’ve made themselves aware of the implications of that. It would’ve been harsher and more burdensome, if PySimpleGUI was relicensed it as GPL3 with no commercial option.
My sympathies lie more with anyone who contributed to this, who is now squeezed out and not provided with a free license. But I don’t think that was likely:
While PySimpleGUI is currently licensed under an open-source license, the project itself is structured like a proprietary product. Pull Requests are not accepted.
But they’re not even Hashicorp let alone Oracle. They’re Mike and maybe 3 others, who’ve made a niche little project that a surprising number of people like. The team like working on it themselves, but need to bring in more money to justify their time working on it instead of work for other customers. And presumably buymeacoffee and Github sponsorship etc. just wasn’t cutting it. This is what they’ve chosen to do to change that.
I’ve been snubbing it due to the monolithic python file, but their readme was comprehensive to be fair to them: PySimpleGUI/readme.md at master · gabrielsroka/PySimpleGUI · GitHub