2024 has been a turbulent year for open-source, rife with lawsuits,

The most successful open-source fork, worth $6B

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2024-10-31 15:30:05

2024 has been a turbulent year for open-source, rife with lawsuits, "sabotage" incidents causing production outages, and harsh labels like "cancer". Amidst these challenges, the ongoing conflict in the WordPress community has been particularly damaging, despite both involved companies pulling in over $400 million in annual revenue.

While the WordPress case may seem extreme, relicensing and forking are fast becoming the norm. With the end of the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP), companies are looking to monetize, while forks preserve the “good old days” of open-source ideals. Take OpenTofu, for example, which assumed stewardship of infrastructure-as-code after HashiCorp changed Terraform's license. Similarly, Valkey emerged in response to Redis’s licensing shift.

Here, I’ll dive into the most successful open-source fork ever. Typically, forking a successful project is a form of damage control, but in this case, it has resulted in two distinct multibillion-dollar companies thriving side by side.