The Open Source License Rug Pull and More at State of Open Con 25

Hang on a minute, can we make some more money off all this work we’ve done on this open source project? Let’s relicense! What could go wrong? Well, it could get forked. And we see that over and over again.

When it comes to thinking about the state of open source, the relicensing issue is one of a number of frustrations faced by the community, many of which will be aired Feb. 4-5 in London at the third annual State of Open Conference (SOOCon25).

“In 2025, we will open the year by having open conversations about the challenges we know the year will bring, building on what has happened in 2024,” said Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK and executive producer for SOOCon25. The topics that will be covered will be license change and forking; funding open source’s future; geopolitical shift and the impact of excluding Russian contributors to the Linux Kernel; the public sector, sustainable software and open source; the global south’s engagement; and the inevitable AI, its impact, and how we want AI to be considered open.

I am attending the conference and would love to see you there.

Open Source and Business

My conversation online this week with CHAOSS Director of Data Science Dawn Foster and Redmonk co-founder James Governor gives a bit of an idea of what is irking people these days about the general state of life in tech and how that plays out with investors and software companies that once embraced the community that used their open source projects.

“I think we’re now at the stage where people are setting out with an intention,” Governor said in an online interview. “We will grow a business calling ourselves open source, and then do the rug pull. And I think that’s much harder to deal with, and get your head around — the idea that people are like, well, you know, that is the business model. I build this thing and then I monetize it by changing the license.”

Ugh. Well, we sure saw this pattern in 2024 and the year prior. The Redis relicense, Terraform — and then the subsequent white knights who forked these projects found a host with the Linux Foundation and found allies with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google, and software companies with an interest in building out their own open-source alternatives.

“I think some of these companies are realizing that while it might sound like a good idea to do the rug pull from a monetary standpoint — it might backfire,” said Foster, who recently wrote about forks on The New Stack. “I’m really curious to see what these projects and their forks look like in three to five years. Are they still around? Which one’s more successful at this point? There’s so much that we don’t know. But I think there are real consequences for these rug pulls that companies didn’t necessarily think would happen.”

Then, there is the whole discussion about open source and AI that will be discussed at SOOCon25. This should be a good one: “The meaning of Openness and AI with Luis Villa, Amanda Brock, Sam Johnston.”

Villa is with Tidelift; Brock with OpenUK, and Johnston, well, read his blog — the noted technologist has deeply critiqued the OSI for its definition of open-source AI.

Here’s just a tidbit of what Johnston has written:

“The Open Source Initiative (OSI)’s board of 10 people (assisted by their employees) took it upon themselves — without the mandate or ultimate approval of their membership — to release an Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) that does not require the source (i.e., training data) of AI models and systems, and which has been roundly rejected by the industry and its experts.”

That’s just a small glimpse of what we can expect at SOO25. I hope to see you there.