So apparently, all it takes to get a really good income(I'm talking >10k EUR/month before taxes) without actually working on it is to write a piece of software people depend on for their livelyhood, then throw a fit when people complain that it doesn't work anymore and block anyone who criticises your work or your behaviour.
After that you say something along the lines of "Y'all are just too much for me, builds are only available on Patreon from now on for 10 bucks a month", taking your open source software hostage.
Then, after you got a thousand people lined up for that, you just ignore that they pay you for your work, don't upload anything new for months and go look at some ducks instead while other people are building your (copyleft) open source project for free.
That is pretty much what happened to the StreamFX project. The dev has not committed any code changes for *months* despite getting paid handsomely for the project. He pretty much held people's streams and recordings hostage by putting an open source project's result behind a paywall that costs as much as Adobe's photography subscription(PS, LR, access to fonts, ..., arguably a lot more bang for the buck).
I'm not mad he wanted to get paid for his work or was frustrated with the lack of contributions. I'm mad that when people told him he lacks social management skills(or soft skills in general) when he had a public developer meltdown on his discussion page, he instead of taking a moment to think about the situation and why noone wants to work with him(from what I've seen that anti-social, anti-community behaviour has been going on for a while), seemingly decided to pretty much just abuse that some users' technological literacy is not as high or their knowledge of open source copyleft licensing isn't as good.
But I don't wanna just say "hurr durr makes money without work"(which, honestly, we all should have that. UBI for everyone please) so here's a graph of commits from the past year. Notice how there are not changes past that peak in May:
Meanwhile, here's his Patreon. To my knowledge, that 4-digit sub count(given the tier's benefits likely mostly consistent of 10$ subs) has not noticably changed despite no (public) changes to the whole thing.
And while I'm aware that there is a possibility he basically just does not upload source code to Github anymore, that then begs the question: Given that the code is GPL-3 and thus cannot be truely closed unless he rips out *anything* contributed by external contributors(which would include translations) or gets their consent to change the license to something that won't benefit them... If he does put up binaries for newer versions on his Patreon, do users also get the source code as the license requires him to do?
Oh yeah, funny thing, when I said "look at ducks" at the beginning, I wasn't joking. I clicked on the YouTube link and this is what he put up since may:
Anyway, I'm gonna stay angry at people and corps that use "open" as a selling point and then when enough people depend on it pull a 180 and do everything in their power to milk that code cow till it's dry. (we've had a few bigger ones in the last month, those who work in/with FOSS probably know who/what I'm referring to)
