Yeah that looks to be the case. Reading the OpenFront readme, it looks like they transitioned to the AGPL believing it to be stricter (which it might be?).
What's also funny is the FrontWars fork's readme.md [1] has not been changed at all, and still credits the OpenFront maintainer as the project maintainer:
> The project maintainer (evan) has final authority on all code changes and design decisions
It is stricter in the sense that AGPL says you have to release source code even if you only distribute the software to a user via a network (i.e., browser) as opposed to a direct/binary distribution.
So in my lay (possibly incorrect) opinion the AGPL made the difference in them having to release the code at all. So in that way it did help. If the user thought this would stop clones then they don't understand software licensing (nor open source).
All the people saying "actually there is no moral argument because this was completely legal under the license" are driving me crazy. The whole point is that something like this can be legally defensible but still be a dick move.
Not saying this is or isn't. But "legality and morality are the same thing" is a pretty scary mindset to have.
I normally would wholeheartedly agree with you on this, but in this situation it seems to be a bit ironic that his project is a derivative of another project, and they unilaterally changed the code they forked under the MIT license to AGPL.
So while moral != legal. In this case I find it both legal and morally a bit of just desserts.
And on Free Balloon Day too, the absolute monsters.
How many times are people going to join the software hippie commune that believes as its fundamental principle that software shouldn't be bound by IP restrictions, and who wrote a bunch of licenses to realize that belief within a strong-ip system, then get confused when they can't enforce IP restrictions.
OpenTofu, Valkey, OpenSearch, NextCloud, OpenSSH, VeraCrypt, OpenBao, OPNsense are all apparently stolen software.
Moral of the story: If you publish something as Open Source, someone may actually make use of it.
Yeah that looks to be the case. Reading the OpenFront readme, it looks like they transitioned to the AGPL believing it to be stricter (which it might be?).
What's also funny is the FrontWars fork's readme.md [1] has not been changed at all, and still credits the OpenFront maintainer as the project maintainer:
> The project maintainer (evan) has final authority on all code changes and design decisions
[1] https://github.com/Elitis/FrontWars/
It is stricter in the sense that AGPL says you have to release source code even if you only distribute the software to a user via a network (i.e., browser) as opposed to a direct/binary distribution.
So in my lay (possibly incorrect) opinion the AGPL made the difference in them having to release the code at all. So in that way it did help. If the user thought this would stop clones then they don't understand software licensing (nor open source).
All the people saying "actually there is no moral argument because this was completely legal under the license" are driving me crazy. The whole point is that something like this can be legally defensible but still be a dick move.
Not saying this is or isn't. But "legality and morality are the same thing" is a pretty scary mindset to have.
I normally would wholeheartedly agree with you on this, but in this situation it seems to be a bit ironic that his project is a derivative of another project, and they unilaterally changed the code they forked under the MIT license to AGPL.
So while moral != legal. In this case I find it both legal and morally a bit of just desserts.
And on Free Balloon Day too, the absolute monsters.
How many times are people going to join the software hippie commune that believes as its fundamental principle that software shouldn't be bound by IP restrictions, and who wrote a bunch of licenses to realize that belief within a strong-ip system, then get confused when they can't enforce IP restrictions.
OpenTofu, Valkey, OpenSearch, NextCloud, OpenSSH, VeraCrypt, OpenBao, OPNsense are all apparently stolen software.
Don't forget GPG! Bunch of dirty hippie export control dodging hooligans! (/s)