But Google now lays claim over its copyright which gives them the right to sell it or take it down completely. But thankfully - if you have an old version - they can't retroactively change the license. However - that won't stop Google from sending DMCA takedowns if it gets big enough.
> so this example is a non-issue
It's a huge issue - when people and companies don't even understand the terms of the GPL [1] copyright and licenses could make a huge impact. Yes - someone can fork it and call it pans and make all sorts of awesome changes - but that's horrible for software development. Now there are 2 different versions with different features - I would rather one project that completely works than 2 similar projects that kind of works.
> the author didn't care
The other contributors did - and that's equally important. I would not want to piss off the people who are contributing code to my project. Once other people start contributing code - a good open source project should respect the opinions and comments of the community.
But Google now lays claim over its copyright which gives them the right to sell it or take it down completely. But thankfully - if you have an old version - they can't retroactively change the license. However - that won't stop Google from sending DMCA takedowns if it gets big enough.
> so this example is a non-issue
It's a huge issue - when people and companies don't even understand the terms of the GPL [1] copyright and licenses could make a huge impact. Yes - someone can fork it and call it pans and make all sorts of awesome changes - but that's horrible for software development. Now there are 2 different versions with different features - I would rather one project that completely works than 2 similar projects that kind of works.
> the author didn't care
The other contributors did - and that's equally important. I would not want to piss off the people who are contributing code to my project. Once other people start contributing code - a good open source project should respect the opinions and comments of the community.
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/85c03a289fe56c67636ed6...