Recent license changes in the open-source sector have sparked significant community responses, often resulting in code forks. Dr. Dawn Foster's research revealed that projects such as Terraform, Redis, and Elasticsearch shifted their licenses largely due to investor pressure for increased profitability. This shift led to new forks like OpenTofu, OpenSearch, and Valkey. While these license changes primarily affected user decisions—particularly for Elasticsearch users—many contributors remained internal to organizations, minimizing the impact on core contributions. Foster emphasizes the necessity for diverse metrics to evaluate open-source community health after such changes.
In all three cases, the license changes led to forks in the code. Terraform begat OpenTofu; a fork of Elasticsearch became OpenSearch; and from Redis came the Valkey fork.
Foster noted that more metrics could be used, but 'this is really just a start.' However, it also shows what can happen when a vendor changes a license.
In the case of Elasticsearch and HashiCorp, relicensing didn't dramatically impact contributors since most of the contributions were internal - neither had much of a community contributing to the core product.
However, according to Foster, 'there was a pretty big impact on some users of Elasticsearch, who had to decide whether they could use it.'
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