Comment by sfRattan

You're welcome! :)

> It's silly to be angry at a firm for wanting to be closed source, but if they start out pretending to be fully open source and community-motivated, while receiving lots of coding contributions, then suddenly do a rug-pull by removing features from the community edition and paywalling all important features, that is something a lot of us are going to be annoyed by.

Indeed, and that is why assessing the long term viability of an open-source or free software project means looking at multiple variables. This thread has mostly been about licenses, but there's also literal distribution of ownership... Both ownership of copyright and of corporation.

Is the code's copyright owned by the company and does the company only accept contributions with a contributor license agreement that transfers copyright to itself? Potential red flag. They're keeping the door open for an attempt to rug-pull, but they also might just be trying to do business via dual licensing.

Is the code's copyright owned by too many people to ever feasibly relicense? Green flag, as long as a healthy foundation exists to keep things on track (e.g. Blender Foundation or The Document Foundation).

Is the company publicly traded or has it accepted large amounts of investment? Red flag. Those investors will demand a rug-pull the moment the lines on their sacred monthly and quarterly graphs stop going up.

Is the company closely held by a few people? Potential green flag, depending on the people.