The Linux Foundation Member Summit

Many popular open source projects are owned and driven by corporations, and in today's difficult economic climate, those companies are under increasing pressure to protect their businesses or show stronger returns for investors.. One response to this pressure has been the relicensing of popular open source projects to more restrictive licenses. In some cases, this relicensing has resulted in a hard fork of the original project. Both the relicensing and the resulting fork create turmoil for the users of that project and the community of contributors, and this impact can have a ripple effect throughout the ecosystem. In this session, we’ll discuss the following topics using a data-driven approach: dynamics around relicensing that results in such hard forks; examples of several forks along with the impact on the communities; and thoughts about what this means for the future of open source. The audience will walk away with an appreciation of why relicensing results in hostile forks and how to think about this issue when selecting which open source projects to use.