What Happens to Relicensed Open Source Projects and Their Forks? (thenewstack.io)
(Saturday December 28, 2024 @05:34PM (EditorDavid)
from the no-forks-left-to-give dept.)
- Reference: 0175780435
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/12/28/2012251/what-happens-to-relicensed-open-source-projects-and-their-forks
- Source link: https://thenewstack.io/what-happens-to-relicensed-open-source-projects-and-their-forks/
A [1]Linux Foundation project focused on understanding the health of the open source community just studied the outcomes for three projects that switched to "more restrictive" licenses and then faced community forks.
The data science director for the project — known as Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (or CHAOSS) — is also an OpenUK board member, and [2]describes the outcomes for OpenSearch, Redis with fork Valkey, and Terraform :
> The relicensed project (Redis) had significant numbers of contributors who were not employed by the company, and the fork (Valkey) was created by those existing contributors as a foundation project... The Redis project differs from Elasticsearch and Terraform in the number of contributions to the [3]Redis repository from people who were not employees of Redis. In the year leading up to the relicense, when Redis was still open source, there were substantial contributions from employees of other companies: Twice as many non-Redis employees made five or more commits, and about a dozen employees of other companies made almost twice as many commits as Redis employees made.
>
> In the six months after the relicense, all of the external contributors from companies (including Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and Ericsson) who contributed over five commits to the Redis project in the year prior to the relicense stopped contributing. In sum, Redis had strong organizational diversity before the relicense, but only Redis employees made significant contributions afterward.
>
> Valkey was [4]forked from Redis 7.2.4 on March 28, 2024, as a Linux Foundation project under the BSD-3 license. The fork was driven by a group of people who previously contributed to Redis with public support from their employers. Within its first six months, the [5]Valkey repository had 29 contributors employed at 10 companies, and 18 of those people previously contributed to Redis. Valkey has a diverse set of contributors from various companies, with Amazon having the most contributors.
The results weren't always so clear-cut. Because Terraform always had very few contributors outside of the company, "there was no substantial impact on the contributor community from the relicensing event..." (Although the OpenTofu fork — a Linux Foundation project — had 31 people at 11 organizations who made five or more contributions.)
And both before and after Elasticsearch's relicensing, most contributors were Elastic employees, so "the 2021 relicense had little to no impact on contributors." (But the OpenSearch fork — [6]transferred in September to the Linux Foundation — shows a more varied contributor base, with just 63% of additions and 64% of deletions coming from Amazon employees who made 10 or more commits. Six people who didn't work for Amazon made 10 or more commits, making up 11% of additions and 13% of deletions.")
So "Looking at all of these projects together, we see that the forks from relicensed projects tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects," they conclude, adding that in general "projects with greater organizational diversity tend to be more sustainable..."
"You can dive into the details about these six projects in the [7]paper, presentation and data we shared at the recent [8]OpenForum Academy Symposium .
[1] https://chaoss.community/
[2] https://thenewstack.io/what-happens-to-relicensed-open-source-projects-and-their-forks/
[3] https://github.com/redis/redis
[4] https://thenewstack.io/valkey-a-redis-fork-with-a-future/
[5] https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey
[6] https://thenewstack.io/aws-transfers-opensearch-to-the-linux-foundation/
[7] https://github.com/chaoss/wg-data-science/tree/main/publications
[8] https://symposium.openforumeurope.org/
The data science director for the project — known as Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (or CHAOSS) — is also an OpenUK board member, and [2]describes the outcomes for OpenSearch, Redis with fork Valkey, and Terraform :
> The relicensed project (Redis) had significant numbers of contributors who were not employed by the company, and the fork (Valkey) was created by those existing contributors as a foundation project... The Redis project differs from Elasticsearch and Terraform in the number of contributions to the [3]Redis repository from people who were not employees of Redis. In the year leading up to the relicense, when Redis was still open source, there were substantial contributions from employees of other companies: Twice as many non-Redis employees made five or more commits, and about a dozen employees of other companies made almost twice as many commits as Redis employees made.
>
> In the six months after the relicense, all of the external contributors from companies (including Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and Ericsson) who contributed over five commits to the Redis project in the year prior to the relicense stopped contributing. In sum, Redis had strong organizational diversity before the relicense, but only Redis employees made significant contributions afterward.
>
> Valkey was [4]forked from Redis 7.2.4 on March 28, 2024, as a Linux Foundation project under the BSD-3 license. The fork was driven by a group of people who previously contributed to Redis with public support from their employers. Within its first six months, the [5]Valkey repository had 29 contributors employed at 10 companies, and 18 of those people previously contributed to Redis. Valkey has a diverse set of contributors from various companies, with Amazon having the most contributors.
The results weren't always so clear-cut. Because Terraform always had very few contributors outside of the company, "there was no substantial impact on the contributor community from the relicensing event..." (Although the OpenTofu fork — a Linux Foundation project — had 31 people at 11 organizations who made five or more contributions.)
And both before and after Elasticsearch's relicensing, most contributors were Elastic employees, so "the 2021 relicense had little to no impact on contributors." (But the OpenSearch fork — [6]transferred in September to the Linux Foundation — shows a more varied contributor base, with just 63% of additions and 64% of deletions coming from Amazon employees who made 10 or more commits. Six people who didn't work for Amazon made 10 or more commits, making up 11% of additions and 13% of deletions.")
So "Looking at all of these projects together, we see that the forks from relicensed projects tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects," they conclude, adding that in general "projects with greater organizational diversity tend to be more sustainable..."
"You can dive into the details about these six projects in the [7]paper, presentation and data we shared at the recent [8]OpenForum Academy Symposium .
[1] https://chaoss.community/
[2] https://thenewstack.io/what-happens-to-relicensed-open-source-projects-and-their-forks/
[3] https://github.com/redis/redis
[4] https://thenewstack.io/valkey-a-redis-fork-with-a-future/
[5] https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey
[6] https://thenewstack.io/aws-transfers-opensearch-to-the-linux-foundation/
[7] https://github.com/chaoss/wg-data-science/tree/main/publications
[8] https://symposium.openforumeurope.org/
This isn't particularly surprising (Score:2)
by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 )
Typically (at least for the instances I've read about) these projects get relicensed because the originator or owner is hoping to milk more money out of the project. Why would some other company or uncompensated individual choose to put time into the project after that?
Re: (Score:2)
by AleRunner ( 4556245 )
> Why would some other company or uncompensated individual choose to put time into the project after that?
The bigger question is why would their customers stick with them when they take the Darth Vader approach to business deals? Think of how many companies are SOL because Broadcom has decided to alter the deal. What's going to happen to companies that rely on Terraform which is normally controlling so much more of their critical infrastructure than VMWare?
Rug pull come backs (Score:5, Interesting)
It is interesting to see what happens after companies do these rug pulls, then realise their mistake and try to make come back to the open source community. Most become a footnote, the classic example being Open Office being replaced by Libre Office. Nobody really recommends Open Office anymore.
On the other hand PlatformIO seemed to have survived. When they did their rug pull I dropped them. I have zero tolerance for cripplewear free versions. Sure charge for support and ancillary add ons, but dick around with the core product free functionality, then I'm not interested. However it would appear PlatformIO rethought the way they would make money and they seem to have regained community support.