Is there actually any legal reason why ImageSharp can't be perpetually forked and offered without a licence file requirement?
There's no way for me to make this post without pissing off some people here, so I'm going to accept it will get a bunch of hate. But I am not really trying to annoy people, however I do have rather strong views about the new behaviour of ImageSharp version 4 (you can't build with it without a licence file). It would be nice if people could read and consider this whole post calmly and not reflexively vote it down but my hopes aren't high.
Inb4 "Why are you so ungrateful, ImageSharp is a lot of work and they deserve to make a living": I'm not rich and I want to use ImageSharp for a personal project to keep my coding skills fresh. I will not be some big company making loads of money off it. Morally, I think it's a dick move of them to get the library really popular on the back of easily being able to use it in a personal project and then suddenly put a big roadblock in place for ANYBODY using it, even people who aren't rich companies. Also, if every NuGet package did this it would become practically unusable. Having to request and wait for days on a licence file before being each to use each NuGet package? Talk about the bad old days of software development. And by the way, for the community licence application, I've only just started developing the project, what am I meant to do? Upload a Hello World program to a public repo, point them at that, and request the licence?
Anyway, the main question I have is: as far as I can tell, ImageSharp is opensource. Is there any technical or legal reason why one couldn't fork it, call your fork "an Open Source work that consumes ImageSharp", and remove the licence file requirement as part of the build process?