https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5599/any-succ...
You get a GPL version of the code, which is free and nobody can charge you for, ever.
If you want to use the software in a way that is not GPL compatible you can opt for the other, paid for, license.
This works in some cases, but in the case of Godot (assuming we were to do something like this) is the MIT license, which already gives you the rights to do whatever you want.
And even in the GPL case, if the other license terms became too odious you could simply switch to the GPL version, and not pay.
https://github.com/SixLabors/ImageSharp/blob/main/LICENSE#L2...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33301518
Again, nothing stops someone from forking and maintaining.
Are you saying this is not legally enforceable? Because I am under the impression from my legal council it is. I can ask again to get more clarity.
The commercial licence is just an additional option for companies willing to pay to not adhere to the GPL terms.
There are certainly cases where maintainers have started licensing _new_ versions of a project under different, non-open source terms (Terraform, ElasticSearch etc.). But you're free to continue using any code that was released under the old licence.
There are some badly written licences which make it ambiguous whether the licence can be revoked in future (e.g. Wizards of the Coast with the OGL), but I have rarely seen this raised as a concern in a software context.
(IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc.)
Either way however then you could either stop using it or fork the project.
You can't retroactively pull an open source license ... whatever the new license is, if it forces you to pay, it no longer meets the definition of 'open source' [1]
We really ought to separate the fact that "open" does not always mean "free" here. Especially given that it is fairly straight-forward to change licenses on a whim.
Imagine you wake up one day and suddenly the company/OSS maintainers put out a dual-license on the project. You now have to pay $0.20 per install after your app has made $200,000 over the past year. Now you're still using open source, but still legally held to the terms of that license.
Licenses tend to be permissive enough that if such thing were to happen or other factors(discontinued development/support/etc), community forks can be created(which has its own set of problems).