With the proliferation of cloud computing, it’s become almost trivial to spin up new infrastructure for your favorite open source technologies. Go to your favorite cloud provider, click a few buttons, give them a bit of money, and violà, you’re up and running. Ok, it may not be quite this easy, but it’s easier than buying servers and installing everything from scratch, which is what we did in the olden days. However, it isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. The rise in popularity of large cloud providers has drastically shifted the power dynamics within the open source ecosystem as a whole over the past few years, and this is something that impacts all of us.
While much of the power has become consolidated in the hands of these cloud providers, smaller companies can flip this power dynamic and gain power back by relicensing open source projects under proprietary licenses (aka the rug pull). But that’s not the end of the story. We can respond to these rug pulls by forking those relicensed projects, which shifts the balance of power toward maintainers and contributors, but it’s not quite that simple because this often also includes large cloud companies and others who pay employees to contribute to these projects. I covered these power dynamics in much more detail in a recent article, Clouds, Code, and Control: The New Open Source Power Struggle on The New Stack if you’d like to learn more.
The power struggle article was a follow up to an earlier New Stack article about What Happens to Relicensed Open Source Projects and Their Forks. All of this is based on the research and data that we’ve been analyzing within the CHAOSS project that looks at what happens when the relicensing of a project results in a popular fork. This data was covered in more detail in the Meet the Forkers keynote and in a panel discussion with Stephen Walli and James Governor at State of Open Con 2025 if you want to learn more.
When looking at contributors for the original project and the fork, the data shows that the forks that come out of these relicensing events tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects. This is especially true when the forks are created under a foundation, rather than a company, and projects with greater organizational diversity tend to be more sustainable. While it’s still too early to understand the ultimate success or failure of these projects (either the original or the fork), it’s becoming clear that people are using the forks, which is eroding at least some of the usage from those original projects. Companies should think carefully about the decision to move an open source project to a proprietary license, since that decision could result in a fork that impacts the reputation of the company driving the relicensing event and fragments the user base between the original project and the fork.
About the Author
Dawn Foster, Director of Data Science, CHAOSS
Dr. Dawn Foster works as the Director of Data Science for CHAOSS where she is also a board member / maintainer. She is also an OpenUK board member. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like VMware and Intel with expertise in community, strategy, governance, metrics, and more. She has spoken at over 100 industry events and has a BS in computer science, an MBA, and a PhD. In her spare time she enjoys reading science fiction, running, and traveling.
