AFAICT, he's still around (although I haven't checked in a while). He hasn't talked to the forge folks, though, so nobody cares.

Unless he's left the scene, we can assume that he merely continues to spread his particular brand of poison in his corner of the internet, rarely venturing into the wider community.

But yes, the modding scene is better than it was. Thanks to FTB (as well as Tekkit cleaning up their act), the modpack controversy is mostly a thing of the past. And thanks to King_Lemming, Pahimar, Azanor, SpaceToad, and the rest of the major players in the scene, closed-source mods are very nearly a thing of the past (but not quite).

Unfortunately Azanor's Thaumcraft is closed-source, so not a great example. King_Lemming (and the COFH team) have historically been closed-source as well, but they recently moved to visible source (sadly, probably due to leaving the scene).

Those are the major exceptions though. Mekanism, EnderIO, Forestry, really all the other big mods are completely open source now. There's been a big shift in attitudes on that topic.

For contrast, when I first got into modding nearly all the mods were closed-source. IC2, RedPower, Equivalent Exchange, Railcraft, and so on. Very glad to have seen this ethos shift.

Crap. I forgot that Azanor wasn't OS. I can never keep track. And you're right about COFH (although they were always notably ambivalent about people looking at their code).

But yes, that was my point. Even BC and IC2 (which, while not as prominent as they were, are still giants, with BC still being the bedrock of the modding community) are OS, IIRC (although as demonstrated by the above example, my memory isn't the best).

I mostly see mods from a user's perspective, though, because I can't actually stand Java.