[muks]

> But we do need a gatekeeper

Having observed this area for 18 years now, I'll say that gatekeeper (a party which has unwaveringly observed and stuck to delivering the principles of software freedom) is the Free Software Foundation. This is the only reason why users gravitate to "open source" - not its sexy name, but the freedoms such software provides when a user wants to use/apply it.

Back in the day, the founding president of OSI justified VA Linux making the "alexandria" project closed source (the software that ran Sourceforge.net back in the day - back when sourceforge.net was a good citizen). The remains of "alexandria" was forked to form other projects such as GNU savannah, and there was a later fork named GForge IIRC.

https://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2001082501120prbzc...

There is only one organization that has unwaveringly sought freedoms for users of software. I've firsthand heard it being accused of promoting communism, and sometimes have wondered if it went too far. At least, they haven't wandered in their principles.

[bigiain]

For all his craziness, you've got to admire Stallman for his unwavering conviction of his version of what free software should be and allow. I don't know whether he'd be frothing at the mouth, or quietly thinking "I told you so..." about the current antics at Redis and Mongo...

[jammygit]

I wonder what it would take for the community to fork a major project in response to a license update by the original company that 'owns' it

[eitally]

It happened with OpenOffice --> LibreOffice when Oracle acquired Sun.

[bigiain]

It's already happened for Redis I think? And MySQL -> Maria.

[rectang]

I'm content to have the FSF be the gatekeeper for "Free Software", and for the OSI to be the gatekeeper for the OSD and "Open Source".