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Can someone please go out and read the GPL license, it's not that complicated. If a company changes their licensing, you are free to fork it and start your own community and continue to provide the support you need for your software. THIS IS THE WHOLE POINT BEHIND OPEN SOURCE!

All I continue to see is developers who are all upset over the Ext JS switch, which wouldn't matter to open-source developers who can continue shipping their open source with the open-source Ext JS (because both are open source). So, it only matters to the hypocrites who are trying to make money from the software they've developed, while denying it to the developers whose software they rely on!

And this seems to be the whole problem developers have with GPL, you don't want to open your wallet, but you want everyone to open theirs for you! You are all hypocrites! And I’m sick and tired of hearing about it!

FURTHERMORE, if you contribute to an open-source project, the only guarantee is that your copyright notice stays in the source code and will always belong to you. That doesn't mean anything other then the code will always be attributed to you. The project is still free to do anything they like. They can use you code, they can rewrite more than 50% and call it theirs (and you can do the same), they can throw your code out, and they can change their licensing at any time. They can even go to a completely closed source licensing model. And this is true with any open-source license, including Apache!

I should also mention that the more than 50% that you rewrite/rework/add has to be as part of that product (one work). You can't just add that product's code to your product's code and call it yours.

Where are you getting the 50% metric?

In the U.S., by law (software copyright and ownership), if you rewrite/rework/add 51% of the code, you become the primary author of the work.

In the U.S., by law (software copyright and ownership), if you rewrite/rework/add 51% of the code, you become the primary author of the work. This does not mean the other 50% loses it's copyright, it simply means you now have controlling interest.

49%

Wait, what do you mean by "controlling interest"?

Because I'm pretty sure that I could NOT just take any random GPL project, make enough additions such that I had personally written 51% of the overall code... then release a closed source project based on it.

I'm no copyright expert, but that simply doesn't make sense. Suppose I wrote a novel and included that in the code comments for each source file? I could get a "controlling interest" in any GPL project I wanted.