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It looks like Microsoft hasn't reformed as some would like to think, but has moved its embrace, extend, extinguish policy to the mobile platform. In this article from techrights.org , we see a company (responsible for Mono) with strong MS connections take over an open source project and close it.
LAST WEEK we wrote about Xamarin's disturbing takeover of RoboVM [1, 2], which was a threat to Microsoft's monopoly and domination of APIs (especially on the desktop). Xamarin, for the uninitiated, creates proprietary software that strives to spread Microsoft's .NET to mobile (including Android) devices.
It has only been less than a week and now we learn from Abel Avram that "RoboVM Is No Longer Open Source".
"Following RoboVM's acquisition by Xamarin," explains Avram, "the company has raised the price of their offering and has closed the source code."
Discussion of a fork is in the works:
It has gotten so bad that RoboVM might be forked. To quote Avram, "some developers consider that closing down the source code has to do with Xamarin's acquisition. And some are discussing forking the project, perhaps starting with the sources v. 1.8 which will be pushed to GitHub this week, according to Zechner. It remains to see how successful they are in their endeavor considering that RoboVM is not a trivial piece of software."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:08PM
That's what they are intended to allow *legally*, but normally the non copyleft guys assume some common interest sharing, or else they take their ball and go home, or the project dies. Your assumption of "copyleft would have stopped this" is probably accurate, but there are certainly successful products using non copyleft licenses, that don't end up having their source code "embraced and extended" underneath them. With so much of the industry buttering their bread with proprietary pieces, you would expect bad actors to get shunned to some degree by mainstream proprietary companies- if you make the world hostile to open source, then everyone says fuck it and goes full RMS, and then you have to bake your own pie 100% of the time.