That might make sense if the tools in question were created by corporations who used OSS as a pseudo demo.

Redis the project/tool existed long before Redis the company owned it.

Vagrant existed before HashiCorp owned it.

Significantly: both companies dropped permissive licensing after the creator of their (original) products stepped away, and both are venture capital backed companies.

So we could just as easily say "I see that long term people will preemptively fork projects the moment they are owned by a VC backed company"

We basically need to see the big users of these projects hiring staff to contribute to the fork and destroying the original project for that to work well i think. We need to invalidate the business model of "buy opensource project, be a giant asshole" by causing billions of losses t( vcs and proving there is no mote like there can be buying closed source before thia bs goes away.

We need to normalize the idea that if a company uses something open source they automatically get someone to contribute to the project. That couple be hiring people in house to maintain it, it could be paying a consultant, it could be donating to a charity that maintains it. Probably some other way as well. However if you are a company getting value from open source you really need to put some money into keeping it maintained.

The above applies to private people as well. You use how many different pieces of software, what are you doing to ensure they stay maintained. (if you are like most nothing...)

Which many developers only adopted, because they didn't had to pay anything, while the tool maker's salaries were being burned by VC money.

Free software existed long before mass investment by VCs. The business arguments for open source existed long before the low-interest-rate period.

We are probably not going to see mass investment by VCs in free software for awhile (perhaps never, but that is pretty strong), but developers will keep scratching our itch.

And maybe more and more developers and users will realise that AGPL/GPL/LGP are the only licenses which truly protect one’s software.

> maybe more and more developers and users will realise that AGPL/GPL/LGP are the only licenses which truly protect one’s software.

I don't think this is a fair assessment of the cause of the issue with redis, or hashicorp, or elasticsearch etc;

This wasn't some nefarious third party taking all the community good will and contributions and creating a private fork to kill the original projects.

If you don't want some corporate asshole to turn your open source project into a get rich quick scheme, don't give control of your project to that asshole.

> because they didn't had to pay anything, while the tool maker's salaries were being burned by VC money

I think you somehow missed the point where Redis the project existed and was extremely popular before it was owned by what is now Redis the company.

The competition for redis in the early days wasn't paid alternatives, it was other open source alternatives; Redis just provided a more featured solution.

Which people adopting Redis didn't had to pay for, if they had to, they would rather suffer with those other less capable open source alternatives instead.

The point is that it wasn't developed by VC money. It was bought with VC money after the fact.

It wasn't a "demo" for a paid product funded by corporate dollars or VC funding, it was just a thing that someone created, and released as an open source project.

It's hilarious that you think the companies dropping open source licenses for the products they bought are going to stop the industry using open source. As I said originally, it's going to have the opposite affect: it's going to make the industry embrace the very nature of open source and create forks of projects, the moment there's a sniff of a corporate buy out, specifically because of this type of activity.

The question here is what motivates individual developers to write big projects and then release them as open source. I think vague dreams of million-dollar deals are part of this for a lot of people. As the developer community becomes more aware of what a grind open source maintainership is, people are already less interested in taking on that responsibility. If we also prevent big money buyouts from happening, I wonder what's left to motivate a future developer to create the next redis.

Redis was created for the same reason most of us create open source tools: to scratch an itch, to solve a problem (or improve a solution).

I find it hard to believe many if any would see "create an open source tool" as a method to become a millionaire.

Dreamers will be dreamers.

The ongoing uptake in open core, shows where it goes.

I think it comes down to is the project there to make money or not. If it's mainly for money then it would never start out open source (ie AWS) but if it's a solution to a problem that can be improved via collaboration then it'll be Open Source (ie OpenStack). This hasn't really changed over the years.

What we are seeing here, as others have pointed out, is that companies are buying Open Source solutions and then close sourcing them because they view it as a money maker which in the end leads to forks.

> companies are buying Open Source solutions

so the original owner of said OSS being sold is making money by selling it to this company (who might be told, or is sold the idea that said OSS could be monetized).

This is no different to a startup making their own acquisition the end goal.

I doubt that. What has been proven clearly in the industry is that FOSS works excellently as a way for businesses to collaborate on common infrastructure. Linux is by far the biggest success in this area, but there are also things like Kubernetes, clang, Python and others.

What does not work, not long term, is trying to build a business around selling a FOSS solution - RedHat is probably the only notable exception here. But having multiple companies invest in a common tool that they all use as part of their infrastructure has worked wonders.

Linux - IBM, Intel, et al

Kubernetes - Gooogle, Microsoft, Amazon,...

Python - Facebook, Google, Microsoft,...

clang - Google, Apple, Intel, IBM,...

Yes, massive corporations who nevertheless don't want to take on the burden of developing a solution of this magnitude alone, or that want network effects so that their suppliers can't sell them bespoke solutions.