This isn’t the controversy the title suggests. Taking the dev at their word, the measures are pretty reasonable; they asked for help maintaining, nobody stepped up, and so it needs funding somehow. You only need a license to access a release binary, and a paid license to access the Pro binary. Source code is open, compile it yourself to avoid. Some features went into the Paid tier: well, something had to. Commenters are mostly supportive.

The dev did yank the previous releases, which wasn’t maybe the wrong choice.

Submitted title was "AltTab.app makes free features paid, drops old releases". We've reverted it now.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Agreed. I was about to get up in arms about license violations and rugpulls, but this is neither. The code is still free and open source, just the builds are up for sale. This is literally a business model encouraged by the FSF. I hope the paid tier is successful and we see more projects adopt this approach when the time comes to pay the bills.

The dev even offers free pro licenses to those who can't afford them:

"I shall add that if for some unfortunate reason you're not able to afford a license, just email me and i shall offer you one"

> This isn’t the controversy the title suggests.

Yeah, I too am so sick of ragebait titles on HN by now, that my bar for contacting the HN mod team has become very low.

> The dev did yank the previous releases, which wasn’t maybe the wrong choice.

I'd argue that it isn't really dropped as all previous releases still seem to be accesible via the tags on the repo. You "just" have to compile it yourself. If the git history were dropped too, that'd be a different story.

This is a horrible title. The developer has kept the entire source code open and you can build from source to get all paid features, and offers a free 14 day trial for all new users. The core functionality of Alt Tab to switch windows is staying free.

(We've since changed the title - more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48288840.)

As a current free-tier user, this price & transition plan seems completely reasonable. I'll upgrade when the nudge comes. I've got at least that much utility from it so far. Very glad this isn't a subscription.

Not a Mac user so I'm unfamiliar with this project, but a one-time $10 fee for a solo dev working on an open-source project that people talk about like it's a must-have for MacOS, who can be mad at that?

This app has been in my kit for many years now and I will buy a license the very day it goes on sale.

I don’t even need the features but I’ll probably buy a license anyway. This software is great and I can’t imagine going back to macOS’ built in alt tab or Mission Control.

The only downside is the "this app is recording your screen" notification light that pops up briefly when you enter full screen mode that a native implementation wouldn’t have to deal with. But clearly, Apple has no interest in building one.

Pretty reasonable. Happy to pay for this, I can't stand using Macos without it.

I already paid for contexts because I didn't know this existed.

Contexts does some extra things I love (type to switch to a window) so it is worth the price IMHO.

$10 one time to a solo dev for something i use 100x a day. people will gripe about anything. take my money, please.

but anyone can take this code, build any features you want on top of it without paying the author.

the titular feature is still free and strong!

the titular feature is still free and strong!