Google Just Found a Cleaner Legal Way to Take Your Code for Free
Hundreds of developers shipped 6,000 free contributions in a year. The license is still open. They lose access anyway.
Six thousand pull requests. One year of free labor. One enterprise paywall.
A developer wakes up to a notification. His pull request merged overnight. Twenty-seven commits, weeks of evenings, finally in. He pours coffee. Opens the news feed. The same vendor, the same day, has announced the successor product. The tool he helped build is being replaced for enterprises. It is something he cannot touch.
He scrolls. The successor is closed. The license he trusted is still technically valid.
He opens a discussion thread on the project's repository. 6,000 pull requests have landed there in 12 months. Dozens of his fellow contributors have been doing what he has been doing: sprint after sprint of free engineering, against a roadmap they thought they shared.
He types the question that has been circling the FOSS community since the first big-company permissive-license release shipped:
"Now I am wondering, will closed product pick some of the code from open source product, or were we (i.e., us, free volunteer/enthusiast coders) essentially working for free on a code base that will only be used in enterprises?" [1]