OpenFront Has Been Stolen
old.reddit.comMoral 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
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).
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)
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.
What is a dick move is releasing an open source project and then getting mad at people cloning it and then go on a PR blitz to try to destroy said fork. You are basically saying "please take my $100" and then 1 week later accuse them of stealing.
When you make your project open source you are basically inviting people to clone and modify them. If you actually read the terms of MIT and GPL licenses you will realize that they aren't just legal documents but also a social contract telling people it is ok to do so. Otherwise why the F would you make it open source to begin with…?
This matters on a concrete level too. Contributors are much more likely to contribute to open source, so you immediately gain clout and contributors by doing so. So to use such a license and then renegade on the implicit promise is a dick move on the OpenFront's creator's part. Also, note how he keeps referring this to be his game and how it's his copyright? No it isn't. Legally the copyright belongs to each contributor for every bit of code each contributor wrote.
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.