It was lying about the Apollo developer for me. He lied, he got caught, and then said (paraphrasing), "wow, he's a terrible person for recording our conversation without my knowledge! I don't want to work with him anymore anyway!"
I don't mind if reddit wants to make some money on their API, but giving app developers barely a month to respond, having insanely high prices, throwing away the relationships they built with app devs, and not responding to community feedback around the issue at all was all too much.
Unlikely considering their source of funding comes from various European governments.
Also, it's not very easy to make open source closed source. The original Lemmy code and documentation is already out there. The only thing they could do would be to add new features that are all closed source. (This is what reddit does, as their old code is open source.) At best, it would be a fork of Lemmy with closed source elements.
Maybe not even that. Lemmy is released under the AGPL3. This means that modified versions of Lemmy have to also be released as free software under the AGPL3 or a compatible license. To release a derivative work under an incompatible license you would need to own the code or be given permission by each contributor to do so. For any contribution where you can't make a deal with the author, you would have to rip it out of the codebase entirely. Note that this is true for lemmy devs as well. If there is no Contributor License Agreement that states otherwise, they cannot distribute the work of other contributors under an AGPL3-incompatible license.
Right, I was thinking the "collective authors"; and to be fair, a small contribution could be replaced if tracked properly. If there's no CLA and there are a lot of significant contributions by various individuals you're absolutely right that it becomes impractical to the point that it wouldn't happen.