You may have noticed how some open source enthusiasts are complaining about companies which relicensed their open source components to proprietary licenses. These companies get maligned using terms like “rug pull” and “bait and switch”, suggesting they were deliberately deceiving their users. I don’t want to speculate about the companies’ intentions, but I do want to point out the logic of these companies, how and why they are important to open source, and how maligning these companies does open source a disservice.
Companies like Redis, Mongo, HashiCorp, etc. converted lots of venture capital into great open-source software. They created innovative software that clearly moved the industry forward, and we are all better off for it. This is a fabulous achievement and a great service to the world [1].
All of the software released as open source will remain open source forever. However, companies may decide that they will not release new features or updates as open source any longer. Venture capitalists expect a return on investment, so there must be something that remains closed. If everything was open, there would be no business. This is the writing on the wall if you are using commercial open-source software. If a community manager or even the CEO told you that they will never relicense, I wouldn’t believe them or at least I wouldn’t rely on it, for reasons just discussed. Community managers and CEOs come and go, investors less so [2].
Providing great software as open source, even with a looming relicensing to proprietary software, is still a great service to the world. It is fabulous open-source software, paid for by someone else! If it is important to you, you can fork the software and move it forward yourself! Which, as anyone following the industry may have noticed, is exactly what is happening. ElasticSearch was forked to OpenSearch, Redis was forked to Valkey, and Terraform was forked to OpenTofu.
In other words: Venture capital funded the risky parts of software development until there was stable high-quality open-source software. Then the rest of the industry forked the code and turned commercial open-source software into community open-source software, typically under the guidance of a foundation. How is that not a fantastic outcome? How did the venture capitalists not provide a service to the world (out of enlightened self-interest)?
The real problem today has been shifting though, to licenses. I think companies can stomach the maligning and FUD, after all they are (mostly) rational entities. And I suspect that the average developer cares much less than the average open source enthusiast.
The problem today is that most of the action is in cloud services for operating open-source software. To protect themselves against competition from the hyperscalers the commercial open source firms would like to use an open source license that makes it unpalatable to the hyperscalers to provide the open-source software as a service. An effective cloud copyleft license would do this trick, because no hyperscaler would want to lay open their tech stack as open-source software. The SSPL-1.0 license was meant to be that license that but was rejected by the Open Source Initiative as an open source license. I believe the AGPL-3.0 license does the trick, but sufficient FUD has led vendors, apparently, to not agree [3].
I believe it is in the interest of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the world to get more venture-capital-funded high-quality open-source software. Right now, vendors are switching to non-open source licenses, reducing the amount of innovative quality open-source software being produced. The OSI should step up and support these business models for reasons explained above through the definition of an effective cloud copyleft license. As long as this license conforms to the open source definition, users can always fork and take over. That’s the beauty of open source.
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