Yes. If I remember correctly, it was the Proton VPN installation guide for Ubuntu (https://protonvpn.com/support/official-linux-vpn-ubuntu) telling people to install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator. That package in turn pulls in the entire Gnome shell…

It’s a thing where the Gnome desktop is installed as a dependency and shows up on the next boot: https://www.reddit.com/r/gotgnomed

Eh, that post title is quite sensationalistic.

1. Nothing regarding the license has changed in the last 2 years.
2. It seems like they consider the non-enterprise code to be licensed under the AGPL:

Thank you for the community discussion around this topic. I do recognize that our licensing strategy doesn’t offer the clarity the community would like to see, but at this time we are not entertaining any changes as such.

UPDATE Feb 2, 2026: To be specific, our license is using standard open source licenses, a reciprocal AGPL license and a permissive Apache v2 license for other areas. Both are widely used open source licenses and have multiple interpretations of how they apply, as showcased in this thread.

When we say we don’t “offer the clarity the community would like to see”, that refers specifically to the many statements in this thread where different contributors are confused by other people’s comments and statements.

For LICENCE.txt itself, anyone can read the history file and see we haven’t materially changed it since the start of the project.

If you’re modifying the core source code under the reciprocal license you share those changes back to the open source community. If you’d like to modify the open source code base without sharing back to the community, you can request a commercial license for the code under commercial terms.

Maybe we can hold the pitchforks a while longer, unless they actually make a negative change.