4 ms·

And? If they are doing most of the development they need a way to finance that. Selling GPL exceptions is a Stallman approved tactic.

• cxr 3y ago
  He approves of developers selling GPL exceptions. He doesn't approve of buying GPL exceptions*. It's a subtle point. (The natural corollary to this is that if the Element/Matrix folks—or anyone—were to ask you for a CLA excepting them from the project's own open source license, then you could/should feel comfortable kindly requiring them to pay you for it—a response which should be the default in the open source world, although it unfortunately is not.) * i.e. so you can make proprietary software
  • cvwright 3y ago
    Personally I’m happy to ask them to kindly maintain my new feature along with all of their other code, so I can continue to use an up-to-date version with very little effort.
    • trickstra 3y ago
      How happy would you be when they later move your contribution to a paid tier only?
      • cvwright 3y ago
        Almost as unhappy as if the upstream project failed and went away completely. And in reality it depends a lot on my level of contribution. If I have dozens of lines of code in a big project, then who cares, all I really wanted was for my pet bugs to get fixed. If I contributed major features or thousands of lines of code there, then I would be very mad. But I would also be very capable of maintaining an open source fork of the project.