> When he found out this happened, he immediately, deleted repos of the code copies of the old license and published a new "commercial" license screwing companies who depended on his database. Luckily, someone cloned the project on Github, but he took it also down with a DMCA.

I don't understand this. If the old version was licensed permissively what argument does he have to take down a copy of it with DMCA?

And the original companies using it wouldn't care - of course they'd have their own vendored copy internally - they don't need GitHub to keep using it.