Or they charge you to upgrade to the latest version and then lock you out of the software if you aren't up to date because it isn't secure. That could happen to.

If it is open source then we can just fork off of the last free version. Lets at least take advantage of the corporations who also want successfully maintained software.

Corporations don't have to maintain open source software under open source licenses if, for example, that software was released under MIT or BSD licenses. They could very well take an project with an MIT license and make it proprietary, and there won't be any free versions to fork from.

> Corporations don't have to maintain open source software under open source licenses if, for example, that software was released under MIT or BSD licenses.

If they own the copyright and control the only source code available, they can change the license regardless of whether it is permissive or copyleft currently.

If they do only the second, they can shut down the repo regardless of the license, even if they don't change the license, and unless it's something like AGPL continue internal use.

If they don't control the only archive of source code, then even if they can change the license going forward, other people can continue to distribute and fork off from the last Free version (again, irrespective of whether permissive or restrictive.) Unless they both own the copyright and have the legal power to retract the license offer for the earlier code (contrary to the usual express terms of license grants, which may be possible if it is a gratuitous license, but even if it is may not be fully effective in all cases because of promissory estoppel.)

Does the license permit it ? If yes then they're not doing anything that the author didn't want them to do.

They license may permit it but the author may not have envisioned this kind of nefarious use that the license permitted.

If you're outside sweeping your steps and I walk by and ask to see your broom for a second and then I beat you to death with your broom you aren't to blame because you handed me your broom.

Your broom example is flawed and in no way a match to the situation.

If you build a broom and I ask if I can see it and you say yes you can see it and you are free to make another one like it for yourself and make more to sell for everyone else, then you can't complain about them doing it.

As for the "they didn't envision", then it's entirely their fault. If they put their code online using default copyright law, this wouldn't be allowed, they specifically picked a license that allow it.

> can't afford to upkeep it

Address the cause, not the symptom. Make it so these individuals are more capable of upkeeping their projects. Otherwise, over the long term, you'll end up with projects disincentivized to do the maintenance, leading to a weaker open-source community.

You'll have the worst of both worlds.

Can you explain?

Not OP but they probably mean you don't get the competitive advantage of owning your own purpose specific codebase, but your library also doesn't have an agile community that's working on it "for free".

What you’ll have is an unmaintained insecure fork held in place by a company who doesn’t have to do any maintenance, since they, and their code, are declared “secure” by fiat.

I don't see how that's any different than where we started from? Google can't just take over an open source library and declare no one can work on it any more.

If it’s MIT or otherwise permissively licensed, they absolutely can take it over by forking, putting enough work into it that it’s not worth continuing the original version, and then not releasing it openly, or with complicated entanglements.

If it’s GPL or similar, the process is slower. They will probably immediately start a grand redesign which will, incidentally, not use the GPL library. In the short run, they will start a replacement implementation of the GPL library, incidentally permissively licensed. Both will take time, but usually gets there.

Both of these cases are seen all the time.