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Posts: 50 | Thanked: 36 times | Joined on Feb 2010
#15
Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.

That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.
This ladies and gentlemen is the reason for the GPL. This lets you sue the living piss out of people like this.