| And like clockwork too. 1. Company builds cool OSS and releases it to the world. 2. The product becomes stable, mature, and users are happy with its feature set. Development slows down. 3. Company starts having to make money so they relicense future code. 4. A few large users of the software (that company was
hoping for $$$ from) realize that since it's mature and stable it's massively lower cost to just maintain the last OSS version. 5. At the time of the license chance the new OSS fork is identical to what everyone is already using and so it's the the least resistance migration. 6. The consortium of actual users of the software drive its future direction instead of the company. I'm not mad about the cycle, it's the moment VC backed software gets turned over to the community. But I always wonder how it turns out for the companies in the long run. |