many popular Open source projects Owned and driven by a company that is struggling in today’s difficult economic climate increased pressure Providing great returns on their investment. One response to this pressure is to re-license popular open source projects under more restrictive licenses to generate more revenue. In some cases, relicensing lead to hard fork of the original project. These relicensing events and their forks can cause disruption to organizations and individuals who use and contribute to affected open source projects.
Several companies have relicensed their open source projects over the past few years, so Project Chaos Decided to look at open source projects Organizational dynamics Continuous development after relicensing, both in the original project and its forks. Our research compares and contrasts data from three case studies of projects that were forked after relicensing: Elasticsearch with fork Open for searchRedis and fork Pedestrian walking machineand Terraform with fork Tofu is open.
These reauthorized projects and their forks represent three scenarios that illuminate this topic in slightly different ways. Below is a summary of what we found when looking at the data, and you can dive into the details of the six projects below Papers, presentations and data What we recently shared OpenForum Academy Seminar.
Nearly all contributions to the original Elasticsearch project came from employees of the relicensing company (Elastic), while forks are created by new contributors and owned by a single company (Amazon).
Until February 3, 2021, Elasticsearch has been an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license. Project has been re-licensed Under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and Flexible License. On August 29, 2024, Elastic became an open source project again when it announced the addition of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3) as an additional licensing option, but there is not yet enough information to include it in the analysis.
Before and after reauthorization, contributors Elasticsearch repository Mostly Elastic employees; they add and delete more than 95% of rows in Elasticsearch all the time, with almost no contributors outside of Elastic. Therefore, the 2021 relicensing will have little impact on contributors, but more impact on users or consumers of Elasticsearch, who are forced to decide whether to continue using it and, if so, which of the two available licenses to use.
OpenSearch was forked from Elasticsearch on April 12, 2021 by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team under the Apache 2.0 license to be able to continue to provide this service to customers. OpenSearch will be owned by Amazon until September 16, 2024, when it transfer project Linux Foundation.
As with Elasticsearch, most contributions Open search repository However, the degree of influence from Amazon employees is smaller, with organizational diversity increasing over time. In the first year of the fork, a handful of Amazon employees made 80% of the total additions to the code and 91% of the total deletions. Only two people who don’t work at Amazon made 10 or more commits, accounting for 7% of additions and 4% of deletions.
In the last year of the fork under Amazon’s ownership (before the project was moved under the Linux Foundation), its organizational diversity improved, with 63% of additions and 64% of deletions coming from developers making 10 or more Over-committed Amazon employees. Six people who don’t work at Amazon made 10 or more commits, accounting for 11% of additions and 13% of deletions. To summarize, the contributors are mostly from Amazon, but organizational diversity is gradually increasing.
Nearly all contributions to the relicensed Terraform project came from employees of the company (HashiCorp), while the fork (OpenTofu) was created by new contributors as the base project.
Terraform will be licensed under the open source Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) until August 10, 2023, when it will be re-licensed under the Commercial Source License (BSL) along with HashiCorp’s other open source projects (e.g. Vagrant, Vault) . Similar to Elasticsearch, terrain repository There are very few contributors who are not employees of HashiCorp. In the year before and after the relicensing, there were only two contributors to Terraform who were not affiliated with HashiCorp, and their contributions were very small.
Since there are very few contributions from outside the company, the reauthorization event does not have a significant impact on the contributor community, so the only people affected are likely to be Terraform users.
OpenTofu was forked from Terraform on August 25, 2023 by a group of users as a Linux Foundation project under MPL 2.0. These users are starting from scratch because there are no contributors OpenTofu repository Previously contributed to Terraform.
Thirty-one people from 11 organizations made 5 or more contributions to the OpenTofu repository in the first year. The biggest contributor was Spacelift, with employees completing more than half of the additions and deletions. Employees at Env0 and Scalr also made some contributions, so there is some organizational diversity throughout the project.
The reauthorization project (Redis) has a large number of contributors who are not employed by the company, and the fork (Valkey) was created by these existing contributors as a base project.
The Redis project will remain an open source project under the Berkeley Software Distribution 3 Clause (BSD-3) until March 20, 2024, when the project will be relicensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and SSPLv1. This is related to 2018 Redis Blog Posts Statement that the Redis open source project will always retain the BSD license.
The Redis project differs from Elasticsearch and Terraform in the number of contributions to Redis Redis repository From people who are not Redis employees. A year before the reauthorization, when Redis was still open source, employees at other companies made significant contributions: twice as many non-Redis employees made 5 or more commits, and about a dozen employees from other companies made contributed almost twice as much as the commitment made by Redis employees.
Within six months of the reauthorization, all external contributors from companies that had made more than five commits to the Redis project in the year before the reauthorization, including Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, and Ericsson, stopped contributing. In summary, Redis had strong organizational diversity before relicensing, but only Redis employees made significant contributions after relicensing.
Pedestrian walking machine Forked from Redis 7.2.4 on March 28, 2024, as a Linux Foundation project under the BSD-3 license. The fork was driven by a group of people who had previously contributed to Redis with the public support of their employers. Within the first six months, Valkey repository There are 29 contributors employed by 10 companies, 18 of whom have previously contributed to Redis. Valkey has a diverse set of contributors from different companies, with Amazon having the largest number of contributors.
This is the first step in a larger research project underway at the research center. CHAOSS Data Science Working Group. So far, we’ve only looked at master repository and organization affiliation data for each project, so we’re working on including more repositories and other metrics to better understand project health dynamics within these projects. We may also expand the scope to look at other projects that were forked after re-licensing.
Looking at all these projects together, we find that forks of relicensing projects tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects. This is especially true when the fork is created under a neutral foundation such as the Linux Foundation, rather than being forked by a single company.
It’s too early to know the ultimate success or failure of these projects, whether original or forked. New forks have more organizational diversity, and projects with greater organizational diversity tend to be more sustainable. However, we don’t yet know if this will be the case for these projects, especially for companies that continue to struggle to meet investor expectations.
CHAOSS will participate Disclosure of Scam StatusThe conference, held in London from February 4th to 5th, covered open source software, open hardware, open data, open standards and artificial intelligence openness. Alex WilliamsThe founder and publisher of The New Stack will host a keynote address on the future of open source.
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2024-12-28 22:25:40