> Don’t be naive, the majority will accept the money and gladly.
I wouldn't accept it to sneak the change in, but I'd probably be perfectly willing to take their hand off and sell rights to the product. Assuming of course I didn't just delete the message assuming it was some sort of phishing scam or other rather than a genuine offer.
I'd feel obligated to make it known that I'd done this, perhaps via a notification in the app prior to hand-over and in its README. Something along the lines of a normal change of ownership message (copyright has been transferred to X, contact them for further information, future official releases will come from their fork, of course existing open source releases remain open source even if they change licencing arrangements for future releases, yadda yadda). Though we all know how often people just click through notifications, so I'm not sure how much difference that would really make - so if I were a robot I might be considered culpable under the second half of the first law...
If the buyer would walk away if I didn't agree to a more silent sale then I wouldn't touch it. It is a thin line that I won't cross, but still a line I like to think wouldn't cross. Then again I have the luxury of being relatively comfortable at this point in my life (decent day job at a company which is weathering the current collection of world crises pretty well, the little flat's mortgage near paid), for many others out there the financial incentive would be much harder to ignore. I'm not sure that I like that I wouldn't draw my line in a different place, but I'd be dishonest if I tried to claim that I would.
I wouldn't accept it to sneak the change in, but I'd probably be perfectly willing to take their hand off and sell rights to the product. Assuming of course I didn't just delete the message assuming it was some sort of phishing scam or other rather than a genuine offer.
I'd feel obligated to make it known that I'd done this, perhaps via a notification in the app prior to hand-over and in its README. Something along the lines of a normal change of ownership message (copyright has been transferred to X, contact them for further information, future official releases will come from their fork, of course existing open source releases remain open source even if they change licencing arrangements for future releases, yadda yadda). Though we all know how often people just click through notifications, so I'm not sure how much difference that would really make - so if I were a robot I might be considered culpable under the second half of the first law...
If the buyer would walk away if I didn't agree to a more silent sale then I wouldn't touch it. It is a thin line that I won't cross, but still a line I like to think wouldn't cross. Then again I have the luxury of being relatively comfortable at this point in my life (decent day job at a company which is weathering the current collection of world crises pretty well, the little flat's mortgage near paid), for many others out there the financial incentive would be much harder to ignore. I'm not sure that I like that I wouldn't draw my line in a different place, but I'd be dishonest if I tried to claim that I would.