I think if you are going to change license, especially in a way that makes it less permissive, you need to be super open and clear about both the fact you are doing it and your reasons for that. This is done so silently as to look like it is intentionally trying to mislead and trick people.
So maybe I wouldn't say to move away because of the specific license, but it's legitimate to avoid something when it's so clearly driven by a single entity and that entity acts in a way that isn't trustworthy.
Yeah.. I have all the respect in the world for Haifeng's talent and I totally understand (and agree!) that open source developers need to be compensated one way or another, and I don't want to get into a debate that could lead to accusations by people who don't know the full story, but there are definitely some sour grapes over the whole situation and some of the pull away from smile has more to do with feelings that not everyone involved is acting in good faith more than issues about GPL exactly.
I was going to chime in to agree but then I saw how this was done - a completely innocuous looking commit:
https://github.com/haifengl/smile/commit/6f22097b233a3436519...
And literally no mention in the release notes:
https://github.com/haifengl/smile/releases/tag/v3.0.0
I think if you are going to change license, especially in a way that makes it less permissive, you need to be super open and clear about both the fact you are doing it and your reasons for that. This is done so silently as to look like it is intentionally trying to mislead and trick people.
So maybe I wouldn't say to move away because of the specific license, but it's legitimate to avoid something when it's so clearly driven by a single entity and that entity acts in a way that isn't trustworthy.