Gregory's ServerHow to kill all community goodwill in a day
Step 1: Make a beloved set of FOSS apps
Step 2: Randomly after years of free support, switch to a 14 day free trial model
Step 3: Sell your apps to company that scoops up every app under the sun
Step 4: Don't tell the community
 18 comments
@10volt Tibbi the dev thinks that ZipoApps are just going to take it proprietary so get ready for some GPL violations @BrodieOnLinux According to Tibor Kaputa 99 % of the code is written by him and other paid developers. If there's an internal CLA or all of them agree to the relicensing and the remaining 1 % is rewritten or removed, then there's no GPL violation. https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issues/241#issuecomment-1837837729 Does anyone know which developers were paid? @fosstastic If it's rewritten for sure but I don't have any reason to trust him at his word @BrodieOnLinux To me it sounds like he won't be involved in the project in the future at all. So any license infringements will (most likely) be caused by ZipoApps and not him. @BrodieOnLinux this new stories encapsulates a few bad things in open source 1. phone software sucks - not many good options for apps/OS @BrodieOnLinux I do not know why the maintainer saw the need to sell. Maybe the money was direly needed and those were the terms of the contract that was offered? Yes, this could have been handled better in an ideal world, but not knowing the situation the person is in: I do not feel comfortable to judge. maybe we would see less of this if we had a financially viable support model for maintainers? Not that I have any idea how that would look like. @hunger He recently added in 14 day trials to a bunch of the apps which were very poorly received so I think possibly he was struggling financially and now he's taking the bag and bailing before it all collapses @BrodieOnLinux Whatever you do as an free software person to raise money: People will yell at you. That's unfortunately a fact of live 😞 Maybe grabbing the bags and run is the best you can do in that situation? @hunger I'm more than happy to have popups asking you to donate personally, but I know a lot of people aren't @BrodieOnLinux You need a *huge* and popular project for donations to pay the rent. Donations will not cover the costs (if you count in developer time) of 99.9% of all projects out there. Many projects do not account for the time spent as the people running it can afford the time. That breaks down as soon as something unforeseen happens in live and excludes a big chunk of the population from participating in FLOSS, too. @BrodieOnLinux Do you know contract details of the sale? It might pay the rent for a long time, or might just fill in a short term budget hole that urgently needs filling. I do not know that. I am sure a steady stream of income above minimum wage from the project would have moved the needle towards "don't sell" a bit though. @hunger What we know is he is no longer going to be involved, whether that means royalties or a lump sum is unclear @BrodieOnLinux @hunger Its also an exellent opportunity for a forkproject to take up the project and revitalising its funding somewhat some what like Thunderbird did.  I, and maybe many others, would happily pay some money for those apps. But app payments are broken.  @tkk13909 @BrodieOnLinux SimpleMobileTools , a suite of several GPL v3 android apps such as Calendar, Gallery, Calculator, etc |
@BrodieOnLinux the F-droid versions were still free so the trial thing didn't bother me, but this purchase sucks, and the best resources about it are reddit threads and a single sentence from the dev, I hope the F-droid repo maintainers don't allow an update that adds ads