Many popular free and 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 like what we’ve seen with MongoDB, Elasticsearch, HashiCorp’s Terraform / Vault, and Redis to name just a few. These companies are putting their projects under non-open source licenses, despite there not being consistent evidence that this actually generates improved financial outcomes for those companies.

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. In this panel, we’ll discuss the following topics: dynamics around relicensing that results in such hard forks; examples of forks along with the impact on the communities; and thoughts about what this means for the future of free and open source software. The audience will gain an appreciation of why relicensing results in hostile forks and how to think about this issue when selecting projects for contribution or usage.