The New Dynamics of Open Source: Relicensing, Forks, & Community Impact

TL;DR

This paper examines how relicensing of open source projects for revenue, often leading to forks, impacts community diversity and organizational involvement, highlighting the role of neutral foundations in fostering diversity.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of relicensing events and forks in open source projects, emphasizing the influence of organizational affiliation and neutral foundations on diversity.

Findings

Forks have greater organizational diversity than original projects.

Neutral foundations promote more diverse organizational involvement.

Relicensing can disrupt open source communities and ecosystems.

Abstract

Many popular open source projects are owned and driven by vendors, and in today's difficult economic climate, those vendors are under increasing pressure from investors to deliver a strong return on their investments. One response to this pressure has been the relicensing of popular open source projects to more restrictive licenses in the hopes of generating more revenue, disrupting the idea of open source as a digital commons. In some cases, relicensing has resulted in a hard fork of the original project. These relicensing events and resulting forks can be disruptive to the organizations and individuals using these open source projects. This research compares and contrasts organizational affiliation data from three case studies based on license changes that resulted in forks: Elasticsearch / OpenSearch, Redis / Valkey, and Terraform / OpenTofu. The research indicates that the forks resulting from these relicensing events have more organizational diversity than the original projects, especially when the forks are created under a neutral foundation, like the Linux Foundation, rather than by a single company.