Comment by bloppe
6 hours ago
"Open Source" can also become "Source Available" overnight. See Redis, Terraform, etc. In the same vein, "Open Source" can also become "Closed Source" overnight.
In neither case does the change apply retroactively. It only applies to new contributions after the license change.
Well technically Redis had a fork before it became source available known as valkey which is still in bsd license
Terraform was forked to create opentofu if I remember correctly
I think the most recent example is kind of minio for this type of thing no?
Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source since it seems that you haven't named any and I am curious how they can do that. There must be some legal laws protecting it.
If a project switches from an open-source to a closed-source license, then from the outside, it just looks like the project was abandoned. The final commit that was published under the open-source license will always be open source. It's the future commits that are now closed source.
So no, I don't have any specific examples of that happening.
In the case of both Redis and Terraform, the forks were announced after the license change, not before. Indeed, the forks were motivated by the license change. The community didn't get a warning "hey, we're about to change the license, fork it while you still can!". It just changed.
That's what I mean when I say the license change does not apply retroactively. The commit of Terraform that existed before the license change is still open-source. I could create a fork branching off that commit today if I wanted to.
> Also I am interested what are some open source projects which became closed source...
The most prominent one is Solaris. It was open one day, and closed the next. Memo didn't say we're close-sourcing it, but moving to a cathedral (final release as open source only) model, but they never released the sources ever after.
Oracle lost all of the core developers over it.
This where Illumos took over.
> There must be some legal laws protecting it.
For permissively licensed code? Nope. Nothing. Even if you don't transfer the copyright, nothing stops someone from forking it and building on it closed source. That someone would be the company opening it or someone else.
In the olden days, when the internet was not that capable to allow collaborative software development, losing developers was a real threat. Now it's not. Developers are dime a dozen. You can close the source, hire some people and continue working on it.
However, this is Open Source model working as intended. Freedom to the developers! If a developer wants to work on a closed source fork, it's completely permitted, baked into the system.
This is why GPL (esp. v3), while viral, is superior. You can't change the license if there's a copyright holder other than you. You can't just fork and close the source. It's limiting to keep the freedom. A working (and arguably necessary) compromise.