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Freeriding and Rebellion: An Investigation of Open Source Vendor Relicensing and Member Hard Forking Events

I’m thrilled to share that the relicensing and forks research that Matt Germonprez and I have been working on over the past 3 years has finally been published in Information Systems Journal, an A-level academic publication! “Freeriding and Rebellion: An Investigation of Open Source Vendor Relicensing and Member Hard Forking Events” is available via open access for anyone to read, and I recommend viewing it in PDF format, since the table formatting is a bit better than in the web version.

Here’s the abstract if you want a preview before you give it a read:

Open source engagement is an ongoing effort in which members continuously interact with evolving project dynamics. Engagement extends beyond writing code or setting policy; it is a shared practice of understanding, negotiating, and adapting to the social and technical structures that define a project. As members continually evaluate their project engagement, collective action threats may arise that impact the overall functioning and sustainability of a project. In our research, we investigate collective action threats and governance practices in relation to a recent trend of vendor defined licence changes that result in project members creating hard forks. Drawing on a netnographic analysis of three cases, Elasticsearch → OpenSearch, Terraform → OpenTofu, and Redis → Valkey, we develop theoretical and practical insights into what collective action threats and governance practices are present, their relationships, and who is involved in them within open source projects that experience relicensing and related hard fork events. Our research provides theoretical and practical implications that show how freeriding accusations become the justification for unilateral, non-incremental adaptation to a project’s boundary regulation and how these governance changes are tied to rebellion as project members reposition themselves within shifting open source landscapes and realign their future open source project engagements.

This is the second place that the research has been published this month, since a short article on a related topic targeted at practitioners was also published in IEEE’s Computer: Value Capture Dynamics in Open Source (also open access).

This research has been a long road that started with me being curious about the organizational dynamics in open source projects that were forked when the original project moved under a proprietary license. I was involved briefly in the OpenSearch community in 2021, but when Valkey was forked from Redis in March 2024 (not long after the OpenTofu fork of Terraform in September 2023), I started gathering and analyzing data that I began sharing in presentations in the summer of 2024. This quickly turned into a short paper, The New Dynamics of Open Source: Relicensing, Forks, and Community Impact, which was presented at the OpenForum Academy (OFA) Symposium November 2024. 

Those initial findings evolved as the forks evolved, and Matt Germonprez and I began thinking about the broader implications of these dynamics. We began giving presentations about power dynamics, rug pulls, and other corporate impacts on open source sustainability to get more feedback. There is a video from the Open Source Summit in August 2025 that you can watch on YouTube and Jon Corbett did a lovely job of summarizing it in his LWN Coverage of the talk. The idea was also turned into a blog post for The New Stack: Clouds, Code, and Control: The New Open Source Power Struggle. 

After a couple of these presentations, Matt Germonprez and I started working on how we turn the data and these ideas into a published academic paper, which you can read today in Information Systems Journal. A huge thank you to Matt, since without him, I would not have been able to get this research published in an academic journal of this quality!

This may be the conclusion of this line of research, since we’ve both moved on to other areas of interest. I’m looking forward to seeing more of Matt’s continuing research into open source supply chains while I focus on consulting (I’m available for consulting engagements focused on open source strategy, contributor strategy, improving project governance, and related topics). I hope you enjoy reading more about our research!

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As with everything I write, this was written by a human without the use of LLMs or other AI assistance.