I'm a big fan of this FOSS game and very excited for it's future, the game being around 20 years old
It’s always struck me as a bit odd that people choose to use a paid proprietary app to access a free and open source social media platform which is developed and hosted entirely by volunteers based on donations. Whilst I don’t have a problem with people making money off of Lemmy apps, making them proprietary and with ads seems against the spirit of Lemmy
Provided that the developer can either remove contributed code or seek copyright licences from every contributor it can be done. Whether this did happen or not is unclear, the developer appears a little arrogant about having written the majority of the code, showing little appreciation towards minor contributors. We cannot tell whether the contributors gave permission for their code to be re-licenced or if their code was removed.
Personally, when contributing to GPL projects I would expect that this kind of thing wouldn’t be possible. Using the GPL is a very philosophical choice of licence and is a move to say that you really care about your users