> Sure, it's upsetting. IBM was upset about BIOS being cloned, Bell got upset about Unix being cloned, Oracle got upset about the JDK being cloned, etc.
This is not like that though; moving from a pro-user license to a pro-business license is the reason for being upset, not just losing control over the product.
With the move, any future improvements run the very real risk of being extended then closed off by tech companies.
It's simply hubris for an entire community of developers to look at an existing working product that got popular due to the goal of being pro-user, then say to themselves "we can replace it with this new thing I created, but in order for my new thing to gain traction it must be immediately favourable to big business to close off".
If you view it in that light, then, yeah, you can understand why the upset people are upset, even if you don't agree with them.
> Many of them were upset enough to engage in decade-long lawsuits. But we'd ultimately be in a much worse place if "avoiding making original creators upset" was the primary factor in development, over things like compatibility, bugs, performance, security etc.
Original creators did frequently get upset, but the difference between "some individual forked the code or cloned the product" is very different to "an entire community celebrating a gradual but persistent and constant effort by the same community to move the ecosystem away from a pro-user license".
I hope this gives you some insight into why people are upset, even if you don't agree with them. Most of them aren't articulating it like I did.
[EDIT: I'm thinking of this like an Overton-Window equivalent, shifting from pro-user to pro-business. It seems like an accurate analogy: some people don't want this shift to happen while others are actively pushing for it. This is obviously going to result in conflict.]
You're conflating two different things. The purpose of rewriting it is not to change the license. The purpose of rewriting it is to provide a modernized alternative with some benefits from the choice of language -- and the choice of license is incidental.
Kinda like how the purpose of creating LLVM was to create a more extensible compiler framework, not to create a permissively licensed compiler. As it happens the license of LLVM has not really led to the proprietary hellscape that some people suggested it would, and in any case the technical benefits vastly outweigh the drawbacks. Companies like Apple that do have proprietary compilers based on LLVM are difficult to describe as "freeloaders" in practice because they contribute so much back to the project.
> The purpose of rewriting it is not to change the license.
I didn't say it was.
> The purpose of rewriting it is to provide a modernized alternative with some benefits from the choice of language
I did not contend that either.
> and the choice of license is incidental.
This I disagree with - the license choice is not incidental; it is foundational to gain popularity in a hurry, to gain widespread adoption at corporates.
The rewriter's intentions is to gain popularity over the incumbent software; using a pro-user license does not gain popularity for all those pro-business use-cases.
The license switch from pro-user to pro-business is not incidental. It's deliberate, and it's too achieve the stated goal of replacing the existing software.
This is one place where I feel that the ends do not justify the means.