Previously LGPL, now re-licensed as closed-source/commercial. Previous code taken down.
Commercial users pay $99/year, free for personal use but each user has to make a free account after a trial period.
If this project has other contributors, imagine how betrayed they must be.
Opening the project as FOSS until it becomes popular and then closing it to make money is such a scummy tactic
Fork the last commit with a LGPL commit?
GPL mentions explicitly that it is irrevocable, where as LGPL doesn’t mention anything about it. IANAL, but it looks like there is a case for irrevocable without violation of clauses by default https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default#4013
For people considering contributing to FOSS in the future, maybe check for irrevocable clauses? I wish licenses selectors https://choosealicense.com highlighted this part more clearly.
Also depends on the contributions terms.
If they were a traditional FOSS, they can’t change the terms without all contributors agreeing or removing/modifying the contributed code so that they no longer have ownership of their authored sections.
Either way, it’s a dick move.
@fidodo @SkyNTP It has already happened https://github.com/andor-pierdelacabeza/PySimpleGUI-4-foss
@fidodo @SkyNTP Sure, but unless that someone keeps it updated that fork will be useless soon. And that looks like a lot of (unpaid) work.
I like the project (was surprised to even see my user name in the contributor list) but stopped using it because I couldn’t get accessibility working (mainly no full keyboard shortcuts).
For me, buying a yearly developer license to have a few GUI pop-ups at work is something I’ll only consider if I run out of options.
I’ve had to sign specific paperwork regarding copyright for just big projects, many smaller ones take contributions without paperwork, which would leave the rights with each contributor. They be better dot their i’s and cross their t’s, it just the legal fees could isnk them before making any money from the commercial license.
IANAL, just in case.
Does the LGPL really allow that or did they make all the contributors agree to allow their code to be relicensed?
Previous versions licensed under LGPL will remain licensed as such. The current maintainers have no obligation to contribute distributing the older versions, but they aren’t permitted to prevent others from distributing it or modifying or doing anything else that was permitted by the license.
And, yes, to change from GPL/LGPL to another license you would need all of the contributors to consent, or to rewrite the parts that were contributed by anyone who doesn’t agree with the license change. Since it looks like there only one contributor according to the GitHub page, this probably wasn’t too difficult.
Was there only ever one contributor? There’s only one now, but all the old commits have been removed.
They apparantly had a police of not accepting merge requests or even code snippets.
@ebits21 #PySimpleGUI #python #opensource
🎶 Another bites the dust. 🎶
Moves like this are a bit… strange? It was on github. There are 1.8k forks, with intact LGPL. What is happening here? Is their dev work worth 99$/year ? Not saying people don’t deserve to get paid for their work. I’m just not seeing the business case for this.
They claim that not enough people donated, hence the change in licensing. But yeah, I don’t see the business case. I imagine commercial devs will just move on to something else.
It’s just a wrapper for other GUI libraries.
That and I’m sure it’ll be forked.
Hey, A lot of people spent their precious free time to look at your project, test it out, and talking about it to their colleagues. How are you going to pay us for wasting however many minutes or hours of time spent on your supposedly open source project before you did the bait-and-switch?
(By “you” I meant the developer.)
It’s quite entitled and dishonest to expect free beta-testing, marketing, and clout from the use of FOSS as a shortcut for your product.
If you are sincere then you should know what you are getting into when you create that license.txt with LGPL terms on it.
It’s quite entitled and dishonest to expect free beta-testing, marketing, and clout from the use of FOSS as a shortcut for your product.
Either show us where they voiced this expectation, or stop talking out of your ass.
@HKayn This may sound cold hearted and I swear I’m not:
There is no obligation for the world in general to pay someone for open source software. (right now)
Everyone should think long hard about writing software and donating time and effort because of this.
I don’t like this state of things, I would prefer some kind of “general usefulness” tax financed grant thing.
And this is exactly why the dev of PySimpleGUI did what they did.
Whether they have a business case will depend on what happens on those forks. Will they be as maintained as the original was?
Donations can give you hobby money. Not “multi-millionaire, going to retire” money. If people who start FOSS projects don’t want to admit that, then they are just looking for free popularity/shortcut to success. They can stop abusing the FLOSS community just so they can make a quick buck.
This set of actions (making non Foss and deleting Foss code) will essentially blacklist it from any company that has used it in the past.
Last place I was at the process for getting legal to review and sign off on specific versions of a Foss was about 6 months, with one of the fields on the form being alternatives.
Whether you are a Hobbyist User or Commercial User, you can start using PySimpleGUI at no cost. To get started with a 30-day trial period, first install Python and then
python -m pip install pysimplegui
…
You can try PySimpleGUI for 30 days, after which you will need to Sign Up. Hobbyist users sign up at no cost, and Commercial Users subscribe at $99/year. For more details, see PySimpleGUI.com/pricing.
How is this trial enforced?
How is this trial enforced?
Since it’s now closed source and they distribute what is possibly/probably/presumably a binary blob, the same way all the others are enforced. With some kind of DRM date checking whatever.
Does pip really allow binary blobs? That effectively makes it zero security.
To be fair it has some valid use cases, take ruff for example.
But pip/pypi does not have any proper security at all, and just blocking binary blobs wouldn’t make a difference when you can freely execute any python code during installation - Much like downloading an executable from any site online, you are expected to make sure you can trust whoever uploaded what you are downloading. You could say the same about other sites like GitHub too.
Take a look at the Source Distribution files: https://pypi.org/project/PySimpleGUI/#files
As far as I can see, it’s still all just Python.
They injected some binary code to make a code object (and in doing so inject some obfuscation)… if someone wants to violate the new license, they can easily work around it via installing through pip, commenting out that license check… Not that I endorse library license violations.
I put up packages on pypi with the last LGPL code versions for my own usage. I don’t plan on updating them much, but they work for me.
PySimpleGUI-4-foss And psgtray-foss.
