say, instead of making the new version of his program cease to function for everybody entirely, he decided that the new version of his program was no longer going to be free, and if users wanted to utilize the newest version they must pay a fee. Say he introduced code instead that checked if a license was purchased for the software, and if so the program works, and if not the program halts. Would this have been considered a "malicious" act as well? Is it wrong these days to charge money for your hard work?