> ...I don't really know what I'm allowed to do, or not, with the project, and that just makes me uncomfortable.

If your interests weren't somehow commercially aligned--be it directly or indirectly--why would it really matter? Perhaps I'm the real radical here who still parades around with a false sense of hacker ethos.

I don't see how commercial interests even factor into this at all. If somebody puts a project out there, and I'm tempted to invest time/energy/attention into studying it, learning it, maybe building stuff with or, or possibly even contributing to it, then I want to know that it's really open-source. If it's not, then it's probably not worth my time/energy/attention because I have an ideological aversion to proprietary software.

As a counterexample to your point, consider RMS: he cares a lot about the details of software licensing, but most people would consider him a "real radical" with lots of old school "hacker ethos" and few would call him "commercially aligned"