Charities, even small charities, have lots of money. They can handle small license fees. They want to comply with the law/regulations/licenses just like any other business.

I don’t think all orgs he’s dealing with are charities proper. AFAICT some of them are tiny volunteer-run groups. I think we safely can assume that not all of those groups have vast amounts of funding.

Fair enough. I still feel like you shouldn’t take stuff that’s not yours. The OP has made the right decision if they don’t want to deal with the overheads of ensuring the images are properly licensed, but denigrating people for catching you out on it isn’t a good look imo.

I guess the reason he wrote on his blog is to inform the users about the change. Why someone posted this to Hacker News though, I’m not sure… It doesn’t really invite to very interesting discussion, IMHO.