Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

I started (and just published) a website[1] that tries to track relicensing risks across a number of OSS projects. The current methodology looks at trademark holders, licenses, and CLA/DCO requirements. I think there's community value in educating develpers, surfacing risks, tracking when a project changes it's posture, and promoting forks.

If this sort of thing is interesting to you, I'm looking to expand the project listing with community support. I suspect the relicensing trend is on its way up.

[1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/

Most successful open source projects are actually backed by companies and most of those projects are of course alive and kicking. The entire fortune 500 runs on software and the most of that consists of massive amounts of open source with some sprinklings of proprietary stuff mixed in. Linux would have stayed a silly hobby project without the possibility for this.

What's dead, or rather was never really that much alive is the notion of not quite so open source projects where a single corporate entity attempts to dictate the rules and actively discourages outside contributions, and people profiting from "their" source code. As a proportion of most widely used OSS software the amount of software and the number of developers involved with it is a rounding error.

There are two main problems with corporate OSS:

1) it stifles the formation of a healthy community of outside contributors. This endangers long term success of projects. The more restrictions exist (e.g. copy right transfers or aggressively anti commercial usage licenses like AGPL), the more likely it is that would be contributors will take the hint and stay away.

2) it limits growth to the strategy, financial success, and imagination/skills of just one company. Because with projects being bottle necked on the financial success of just one company and cut of from outside help, absolutely nothing happens unless that one company pays for it.

And with finances effectively supplied by VC investors interested more in IPOs and quick exits than good software, OSS is just a buzzword that goes on the investor deck and not something they actively value or appreciate. Hence legal monstrosities like BSL that make no sense whatsoever from the point of view of nurturing a healthy community of external developers. Most VC companies of course fail. That kind of is the point. And most of their restrictively licensed software projects die along with them and don't survive the implosion of these companies. Developers move onto other things and the software gets peddled to hedge-funds or companies like IBM.

The only exception to this is properly licensed open source that can simply be forked. Oracle, Redis, Red Hat, Hashicorp, Elasticsearch, etc. found that out the hard way. The answer is not getting more proprietary about OSS software and preventing forks. The software gets forked precisely because these projects are too valuable to let it rot away behind corporate pay walls. This is not a failure of open source but actually a huge success. The software will long survive the misguided corporate shenanigans. The software and community will be fine. Those companies, possibly a lot less.

You cut off “if you care about what happens to them afterwards”. It’s perfectly fine for somebody to just give software away as long they’re fine that someone else will make money off it. You don’t seem to be fine with it, but others are.

Teraform and serverless doing the exact same thing at the exact same time really indicates that the market conditions that allowed for software like this was not long term sustainable.

As a builder that leverages them both, I'm saddened, but I get it.

Which hard way? None of those forks are relevant enough to matter.