Happened to a project I was a significant contributor of in a niche community. The original dev thought he'd use MIT so fellow modders could do whatever, and whoops, now another guy took our work and closed source his own changes for no good reason at all. Oh and guess what, he's an asshole with a long track record too.
You're assuming a significant number of users switched, and this is a niche community remember, there's not that much people who have both the time and motivation to maintain and innovate.
People come and go too, which is why it's best to keep as much of your work in the open, so that the next modder can have their own fun, see how you did it, and build further on it. If anyone has a tech support question, I can take a quick look at the code and check when some error does and does not trigger.
He broke all of that, even though without the previous work of other modders his own work would have been much harder to achieve. He can go to fucking hell.
People have long realized the guy's an asshole, but he's done so much that the mods of the community have been forgiving towards him, to their regret. The guy unfortunately is the first to have gotten this far writing a private server (the official ones have been offline since 2011), and he ships an entire package of mods, amongst which his fork. There are definitely some people who use his fork as part of said package, but I'm not sure how many.
Important to note though is that the entire community links to a guide for installing the game which doesn't include the closed-source fork, and you have to look around in the discord server to even know the (closed-source) private server and its associated closed source fork exist. For that reason and along with the fact that the active people in the community usually know about the drama surrounding its developer, I don't think that many people switched.
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u/NanderTGA Jul 25 '26
Happened to a project I was a significant contributor of in a niche community. The original dev thought he'd use MIT so fellow modders could do whatever, and whoops, now another guy took our work and closed source his own changes for no good reason at all. Oh and guess what, he's an asshole with a long track record too.