> Honestly, you do need a lecture for not being able to see the obvious

You are making a ton of reading comprehension errors, as well as completely incorrect assumptions about the situation I described. And then lecturing me about those incorrect assumptions. Cool cool.

> a competitor was able to use your open source code without sharing subsequent work on the codebase.

No, that's not what I said at all. I described how a company used one of my open source libraries in a way which directly competed with my primary product. The problem here is they did share their changes, and those changes included functionality which was already present only in the enhanced paid closed source edition of my product.

This is why I said it was a "hostile fork" of my library: users could combine the open source edition of my product with the hostile fork of my library to get functionality for free that normally is only in my paid product.

I absolutely understood that this situation was possible with a permissive license. I just did not expect a company to do this so soon after my paid product launched, especially as the product wasn't even financially successful yet by that time.

> This would obviously have never happened with the AGPL license

I can say with absolute certainty, if my product had an AGPL license, it would not have succeeded in any form. Many of my largest users do not adopt AGPL software under any circumstances.

> You tried to change the codebase and / or license to make it more difficult for them to fork your code and use it.

The former, not the latter. I never tried to change the license, nor said anything about that here. I changed the codebase so that the previously-external library was now an internal package instead of a standalone repo, and refactored things to prevent compatibility with the hostile fork.

> Your code was used by others in the spirit of the open source license you chose. And yet, you continue to assert you are the wronged party?

My code was used in a way which negatively impacted the revenue stream which would pay for further development of that code. As I've said elsewhere in this subthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37084057, the license is entirely neutral about that topic: it neither encourages nor discourages such use. However, I assert that common sense should typically discourage people from such antisocial behavior, because you can reasonably expect that kneecapping the revenue stream for a project can result in that project either getting killed off or radically changing shape in response.

> you (wrongly) chose a permissive opensource license out of self-interest to your business (hoping to attract more developer contributions

I never said anything about "hoping to attract more developer contributions" and that has never been my motivation for open sourcing this work. I described why I chose an open source license directly in a sibling subthread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37083698

> and then close source the product later when it becomes profitable, just as your competitor did

You're just completely inventing false details here out of thin air!

My product has two editions, a FOSS one and an enhanced paid one; the latter is closed-source. Both editions already existed at the time of the events I'm describing here. Both are still actively developed and supported, and today they're widely used by companies you are definitely familiar with.

The library in question was one component of this product, not the product itself.

Meanwhile the startup that made the hostile fork of the library runs a managed service (SaaS).

> Your competitor outwitted you because you weren't knowledgable about licenses, your own business goals and business model.

I guess it's easy to conclude whatever offensive thing you'd like when you just make up all the details instead of reading the thread or asking questions about the situation!

Anyway this is completely off the rails of my original point, which is that there are multiple kinds of "freeloaders". Some of them actively destroy the thing they're taking for free, which was why I made the Little Free Library analogy. Just because something is "free" (as in beer) doesn't mean there should be an expectation that the thing will continue to exist in that form once abusive bad actors exploit the free-ness of the offering.

We're seeing this play out over and over again across many FOSS projects, and my prediction is this trend will only accelerate.