What's also funny is the FrontWars fork's readme.md [1] has not been changed at all, and still credits the OpenFront maintainer as the project maintainer:
> The project maintainer (evan) has final authority on all code changes and design decisions
So in my lay (possibly incorrect) opinion the AGPL made the difference in them having to release the code at all. So in that way it did help. If the user thought this would stop clones then they don't understand software licensing (nor open source).
How many times are people going to join the software hippie commune that believes as its fundamental principle that software shouldn't be bound by IP restrictions, and who wrote a bunch of licenses to realize that belief within a strong-ip system, then get confused when they can't enforce IP restrictions.
OpenTofu, Valkey, OpenSearch, NextCloud, OpenSSH, VeraCrypt, OpenBao, OPNsense are all apparently stolen software.
Not saying this is or isn't. But "legality and morality are the same thing" is a pretty scary mindset to have.
When you make your project open source you are basically inviting people to clone and modify them. If you actually read the terms of MIT and GPL licenses you will realize that they aren't just legal documents but also a social contract telling people it is ok to do so. Otherwise why the F would you make it open source to begin with…?
This matters on a concrete level too. Contributors are much more likely to contribute to open source, so you immediately gain clout and contributors by doing so. So to use such a license and then renegade on the implicit promise is a dick move on the OpenFront's creator's part. Also, note how he keeps referring this to be his game and how it's his copyright? No it isn't. Legally the copyright belongs to each contributor for every bit of code each contributor wrote.
So while moral != legal. In this case I find it both legal and morally a bit of just desserts.
