I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year doing research into open source projects that have moved to proprietary licenses and the forks that were the result of those license changes. More recently (starting with a talk at Monki Gras), I’ve been thinking about how the power dynamics within the open source ecosystem have evolved and how rug pulls, relicensing, and forks can shift those power dynamics.
I finally wrote all of this down and turned it into a blog post for The New Stack: Clouds, Code, and Control: The New Open Source Power Struggle. Here’s a short quote from the post:
“With the rise in popularity of large cloud providers, the open source power dynamics are looking kind of similar to the feudalism example I talked about at the beginning of this blog post, but in the open source case, what’s different is that we have ways to shift or flip the power dynamics. A smaller company deciding to move a project away from an open source license can flip the power dynamic and gain power back from those large cloud providers. Still, they also shift the balance of power even further away from contributors and users at the same time when they decide to relicense that project. This encourages those with less power to take collective action to fork a project, flipping the power dynamic in favor of the contributors and users, often including the cloud providers as users. Within the open source world, we are better off than the peasants and serfs because we have certain freedoms that allow us to take collective action to regain power by forking projects when others abuse their power.” – read the rest of the blog post on The New Stack.
If you want to learn more about the research, here are a few places to get started:
- What Happens to Relicensed Open Source Projects and Their Forks? – another blog post for The New Stack from December 2024
- State of Open Con Keynote – the 7 minute video version of the research from February 2025
- The New Dynamics of Open Source: Relicensing, Forks, and Community Impact – an academic paper presented at the Open Forum Academy in October 2024
- Other talks and panel discussions on this topic can be found on my Speaking page
- We are also collaborating on next steps for this research within the CHAOSS Data Science Working Group if anyone wants to join us!
Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash