Whenever chaos takes over A proprietary technology relied upon by millions, the default reaction from many seems to be: “Hey, let’s see what the open source world has to offer.”
Case in point: The steady demise of X (Twitter) since Elon Musk took over last year has led many to look for more “open” alternatives, be it Mastodon or Bluesky.
This scenario became all too familiar throughout 2023, as established technologies relied on by millions hit a curve of chaos, making people realize how loyal they are to a proprietary platform over which they have little control.
The OpenAI fiasco in November, where the ChatGPT hit maker temporarily lost its co-founders, including CEO Sam Altman, created a whirlwind five days of chaos that culminated in Altman’s return to the OpenAI hotseat. But only after businesses had built products on top of OpenAI’s GPT-X Large Language Models (LLM). he began to wonder the wisdom of going all-in on OpenAI, with “open” alternatives such as Meta’s Llama-branded LLM family well-placed to capitalize.
Even Google has seemingly recognized that “open” can trump “proprietary” AI, with leaked out internal memo written by a researcher expressing fears that open source AI was on the front end. “We don’t have a moat, and neither does OpenAI,” the note noted.
Elsewhere, Adobe’s $20 billion bid to buy rival Figma — a deal that ultimately died amid regulatory wrangles — was a boon for open-source Figma challenger Penpot, which saw signups rise amid a mad panic that Adobe might be about to unleash a corporate downpour. in the proverbial Figma parade.
And when cross-platform game engine Unity revealed one controversial new fee structure;, developers went berserk, calling the changes disastrous and unfair. The result caused Unity to make a quick turnaround, but only after a team from the developer community started to check out open source competitor Godotwhich also now has a commercial company driving core development.
But while all of this helped highlight the eternal struggle between the open source and proprietary software realms, within the open source community once again revealed itself to all – with proprietary companies usually the root cause of the confusion.
The (not so) open source factor
Back in August, HashiCorp changed Terraform’s popular “infrastructure-as-code” software from a “copyleft” open source license to the available source Business Source License (BSL or sometimes BUSL), which places greater restrictions on how third parties can commercialize the software — particularly where it can compete with HashiCorp itself. The reason for the change? Some third-party vendors benefited from Terraform’s community-based development without giving anything back, HashiCorp said.
This led to a vendor-led faction ousting the original Terraform project and going it alone with OpenTF, eventually renamed to OpenTofu by Linux Foundation service as the governing body. While HashiCorp was perfectly within its rights to change the license and protect its business interests, it also created uncertainty for many of its users. According to OpenTofu proclamation:
Overnight, tens of thousands of businesses, from one-person shops to the Fortune 500, woke up to a new reality where the foundation of their infrastructure suddenly became a potential legal hazard. The BUSL and additional use grant drafted by the HashiCorp team are unclear. Now, every company, vendor, and developer using Terraform must ask themselves whether what they’re doing could be construed as competing with HashiCorp’s offerings.
Of course, HashiCorp is far from the first company to make such changes. Application Performance Management (APM) platform. Guard transition from open source BSD 3-Clause License to BSL in 2019 for reasons similar to those cited by HashiCorp. However, this year Sentry created an entirely new license called the Functional Source License (FSL) designed to “provide freedom without harmful free-riding,” the company said at the time. It’s a bit like BSL, but with a few tweaks — for example, FSL-licensed products automatically revert to an open-source Apache license after two years, compared to four years with BSL.
Again, this highlighted the eternal struggle of companies wanting to embrace the ethos of open source, without compromising their commercial interests.
“There’s a long history of companies with deeper pockets and more resources taking advantage of traditional open source companies,” Sentry’s head of open source Chad Whitacre he said in November. “Open source companies, regardless of license or pedagogic definition, are increasingly dependent on being venture-backed, for-profit, or most importantly supported by the companies that build on their code.”
And similar to Grafana before thatElement moved the Matrix decentralized communication protocol from a fully permissive Apache 2.0 license to a less permissive open source AGPL license, which forces all derivative projects to maintain the exact same license – a major deterrent for commercial companies looking to build proprietary products.
Element said the cost of maintaining Matrix, to which it makes the vast majority of contributions, forced it at a time when other companies’ business models were designed around building proprietary software based on Matrix — without any of the costs borne by Element Element to maintain the Matrix. “We’ve made Matrix wildly successful, but Element is losing its ability to compete in the very ecosystem it’s created,” the company wrote at the time.
This license change essentially meant that companies using Matrix would have to contribute their code back to the project… or pay Element for a commercial license to continue using it in a proprietary product.
So on the one hand, companies, consumers and developers have seen how going all-in on proprietary platforms can lead to vendor lock-in and disastrous consequences when things go belly up. But on the other hand, businesses built on strong open source foundations can easily move up the ladder by changing the terms of engagement — all in the name of trade protectionism.
All this, of course, is nothing new. But the last 12 months have really highlighted both the power and the dangers of open source software.
