SCALE penguin in a space suit next to my profile picture showing my purple hair. Text reads: SCALE 23x Mar 5-8, 2026. Dawn Foster.
General

Power Dynamics, Rug Pulls, and Other Corporate Impacts on OSS Sustainability at SCALE 2026

As many of you know, this isn’t a new topic for me. I’ve written here about what your OSPO can do about power dynamics, rug pulls, and other corporate impacts on OSS sustainability along with a post on the OpenUK blog, The Shifting Power Dynamics in Open Source: Rug Pulls, Relicensing and Forks, and on The New Stack, Clouds, Code, and Control: The New Open Source Power Struggle. I’ve also given other presentations on this topic, so you can watch the video from the recent Open Source Summit EU (OSSEU) in Amsterdam, which Jon Corbett did a lovely job of summarizing in his LWN Coverage of the talk. 

I’ve been continuing to think about how power dynamics and rug pulls impact OSS sustainability, and I had an opportunity to talk about this at SCALE 2026 in Pasadena last weekend! I already blogged about how much I love SCALE, so I won’t continue to gush about how great it is. SCALE gave me a bit more time than I’ve had for the other presentations, so I added some new slides about other types of rug pulls beyond the relicensing and forks that I’ve previously focused on. I talked more about MongoDB, which kicked off the recent wave of relicensing when they relicensed under the newly created Server Side Public License (SSPL), which didn’t result in a fork. I also talked about some examples of rug pulls that came about when images / releases were put behind a paywall (Bitnami / Linkerd). My slides are a bit sparse, but available, and SCALE will also release the video of the talk if you want more details.

Resources:

I’m available for consulting engagements focused on open source strategy, contributor strategy, improving project governance, and related topics.