People can fork the last-published BSD version. Nobody's taken that freedom from them.

Nobody can relicence the code that's under your copyright without your permission.

> I am afraid there's nothing people can do about this issue

There is: offer the maintainer a decent (probably part-time) wage for working on this while keeping it open source.

A key problem is getting people to pony up. People are all for "the community" and the maintainers doing right by "the community" when that means they (as a member of the community) get the benefit of the code. They are often less vocal about being part of the community then the project maintainers ask for financial assistance, generally assuming that other people will chip in so it'll be OK if they don't.

This isn't just commercial interests: this is private individuals too. Welcome to the idealism of F/OSS rubbing up against less altruistic parts of human nature.

While I'm judging others I'll have to hold my hands up and say that, while I have helped out some projects in the past via both bug-fix contributions and small financial ones, and having opened some of my projects in the dim & distant past, I don't think I can claim to be a net contributor by any wider measure.

I don't see this as idealism vs a selfish human nature, not directly at least. The maintainer has been delivering a low level open-source product within a proprietary operating system. That's got to be tough, and as the article states, it's the main source of hurdles to others taking up the project.

There is one huge thing that can be done about this. Push the commercial users of osxfuse to penny up and share some profit. According to the article they are using osxfuse for free and not contributing any code back either.

If you use software that is dependent on osxfuse....send an email to your sales contact and let them know that they need to contribute back to the community.

This is the exact reason why I prefer BSD/MIT/Apache type licenses. It doesn't try to control people. GPL has a very offputting authoritarian bent.

Cursory look at recent checkins seems to indicate that he wrote all the code.

As the copyright holder of the code he could re-license it the same way even if it was GPL.

> Cursory look at recent checkins seems to indicate that he wrote all the code.

1. There are github commits not by him in the project.

2. There are lots of copyright assertions scattered through the project. The first one I ran into was:

> Copyright (c) 2006-2008 Amit Singh/Google Inc.

but I'm sure there are way more than that.

If he wanted to switch to GPL, he wouldn't have to relicence all the code; just the code that is by him alone. The contributions by others are in a permissive license that is compatible with the GPL, so they could remain in their current state; but the whole project would contain GPL code so anyone redistributing the project would have to do abide with the terms of the GPL.

He did not.

What would be the incentive to deal with all the closed sourced Apple issues? GPL does not guarantee that someone else will be fixing it for free.