What a year it was for open source. We continued seeing open source tools turning to the dark side this year. We had projects relicensing off open sou

Dark Side of Open Source: The Community Strikes Back

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2025-01-09 16:00:04

What a year it was for open source. We continued seeing open source tools turning to the dark side this year. We had projects relicensing off open source, most notably Redis. We also saw the nasty bickering in the Wordpress community that dragged into court.

But 2024 was the year we saw the community strike back, more fiercely than ever, with successful forks, joining forces with foundations and more.

A couple of years ago, when I gave a talk at Open Source Summit about open source turning to the dark side, people giggled, saying I’m being overly dramatic. This year it took center stage in the keynote of Open Source Summit 2024.

This comes after the turbulent 2023 that saw open source champion HashiCorp taking Terraform off open source, along with other prominent open source projects. FOSS was in flux, and it carried on into 2024.

Probably the highest profile case this year was Redis taken off open source. The popular key-value store database was originally licensed under the permissive BSD-3-Clause License, and enjoyed widespread adoption and an active community.