The package maintainer, as you said, handled this very gracefully.
Yeah, the author is likely in the wrong/gray (IANAL). But I can't help but be disappointed that posters below immediately jump to "Well, it should be free anyway!" "Why is he protecting his code?" "Here is an evil oppressor trying to keep something valuable to himself."
Here is a developer who tried to build a living using his own software, something many of us aspire to do. Why are we so quick to throw him under the bus? Is it because we instinctively always want to "defend the underdog"?
> Here is a developer who tried to build a living using his own software, something many of us aspire to do. Why are we so quick to throw him under the bus?
Because he published it under a license he apparently never intended to honor. It's like trying to charge someone for a free sample after they've eaten it.
He was mistaken about what that license meant, not dishonourable. He intended to honour what he thought the license meant, and wasn't performing some sort of shell game. Threedaymonk took the best course in honouring what the original author intended, rather than the mistakenly-applied licensing.
FOSS licenses are confusing to people who don't live and breathe them. One other example from quite a few years back was when SugarCRM open-sourced their code and put it under a GPL license. They thought it meant 'you get to see what we're doing', but after a couple of competitors forked off it (we used vTiger, from memory), they got a short, sharp lesson in 'what the GPL means'. Their code from that point on was not GPL'd.
Yeah, the author is likely in the wrong/gray (IANAL). But I can't help but be disappointed that posters below immediately jump to "Well, it should be free anyway!" "Why is he protecting his code?" "Here is an evil oppressor trying to keep something valuable to himself."
Here is a developer who tried to build a living using his own software, something many of us aspire to do. Why are we so quick to throw him under the bus? Is it because we instinctively always want to "defend the underdog"?