Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

The societal value of commercial open source

The heat about recent relicensing in open source land has dissipated a bit. To recap in a nutshell what had people riled up: Venture-capital-backed startups increasingly went to market by providing their software product, in particular software infrastructure components, under an open source license (dual-licensing, next to their commercial license). Eventually, payday came, and they stopped releasing new features under the open source license, letting the existing open-source software go stale.

Two recent examples are Hashicorp and Redis with their products Terraform and Redis. These open-source softwares were widely used and successful, with sizable user communities. It was rather upsetting to many open source enthusiasts when these companies stopped providing their software under an open source license.

However, the story did not end there.

In both cases, Terraform and Redis, and in many important cases that came before, the user communities decided to fork the last known good open source version and so now we have community open source projects OpenTofu and ValKey. These are legitimate open-source softwares. They are under the guidance of an open source foundation and, assuming (soon) widely distributed copyright holdership, will remain community open source.

This is a fabulous outcome!

I think it is great if a community of users steps up and becomes a community of contributors and leaders! Turning commercial open source into community open source is a natural conclusion. As I have argued before, it is unrealistic to assume that a venture-capital backed software startup will provide their product for free, forever.

Open source licenses are a great tool. They allow companies to go to market with a convincing value proposition. They allow user communities to appropriate the money the venture capitalists invested into developing good open-source software. And while the venture capitalists and the vendors may not be happy about a community fork, they knew it was always in the cards. It is the price they pay for benefitting from an open source user community.

In summary: Commercial open source, in particular in the form of the dominant single-vendor open source model, makes it possible for venture capitalists to channel significant funds into developing open-source software for all-around benefit: For the startup, for the user community, and for society which ends up with more choice and better open-source software.

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Comments

  1. […] an effective cloud copyleft strategy, there may be no venture-capital backed open source and hence no benefit to society any more. So bear with […]

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