How's that open source licensing coming along? That well, huh? Multiple license changes have rocked the open source community over the last few years. For vendors concerned, the impact has ranged from business as usual to potentially catastrophic. Dr Dawn Foster, director of data science at the CHAOSS Project, presented research at this month's State Of Open Con '25 in London, showing …
> for 2 of them it made fuck all difference.
Only in the context of source code contributions. That people left to create forks demonstrates a loss of trust and reputation, and that the forks continue to endure indicates similar work is likely being done across the original and the fork - a loss of efficiency in the sense of duplicate development effort.
License changes, such as those described in the article, is why CLAs are getting less popular these days. The FSF having one probably helped give people confidence in them because they trusted that whatever the FSF did with the copyright you gave them, it was probably something you'd be at least okay with. They did do the same things, but, for example, to change from GPL 2 to GPL 3, not from GPL to proprietary.
Nowadays, I see more resistance to CLAs. Theoretically, any copyright holder should be able to enforce it, so you don't need to own all the code in a project to enforce that license. Having more different people means more who can defend against violations at the cost of making it much more difficult to change the license. In the early days, needing to change the license seemed more logical as it hadn't been thoroughly tested in courts, but now that any license you're likely to choose has gone unchanged for over a decade if not three, this is less of a concern.
It also protects against cases like the original code author dieing and his estate changing the licensing terms
It's happened 3 times that I know of in critical libraries, resulting in a lot of work needed to reduce exposure
Just because you believe in GPL and opensource doesn't mean your heirs aren't going to be money-grubbing fucktards
Outside of computing, a similar issue raised its head with "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree" and "land down under" - in that case with the author dieing intestate and her copyright archive being sold onto a troll who did what trolls do - 30 years after the men At Work single was released and 15 after she died
If you choose the right FOSS license, and extra terms from the onset, all is well with the world.
So many companies choose the GPLv2/3 because it is "trendy" .
but if your company is contributing 90% of the code. Maybe a permissive license (MIT/BSD/APACHE) is better suited.
Or, a GPLv2, but you only pull commits if license ownership is transferred to the organization.
Anywho, only tiime will tell with these 3 projects
Your suggestions would work for the company that plans to pull the bait and switch "it's suddenly proprietary" approach, but now that contributors have seen it happen a few times, more of them are going to resist it. If your company wrote all the code in the project, then they can do whatever they want to the license, including making it proprietary. If they invited and got contributions from others, those others don't tend to appreciate their free contributions being treated as the company's property which the company will later sell back to the person who originally created it. Companies that are considering making a product should think about whether they want to get the benefits of open source (free contributions and lots of users) or the benefits of proprietary (they get to charge every user if they want to), and they should be aware that both is usually not an option, and when it's tried, they may not appreciate the result.
One reason to explain the low contributions, to Terraform at least, is that the repository that was forked is for the core Terraform binary/language. That doesn't really change all that often.
What _does_ change often are the individual providers, for things such as AWS, etc. which are in separate repositories and are (currently) still licensed under the MPL or similar, so they haven't had a need to fork those yet.
This sort of thing isn't new; there have been many examples over the years of what happens when you change the licence on your software and piss off a substantial fraction of your contributors. OpenSSH has its origins in changes to the SSH licence; Xorg replaced XFree86 due to licence changes in XFree86 4.0. Who now uses SSH or XFree86? Sometimes you don't even have to change the licencing if you can find another way to piss off your user base; ZIP files exist because SEA sued PKWARE over PKARC and SEA/ARC are now effectively dead.
Do the people who try to monetise other people's work not read any history?
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