reactive
In September 2024, Elastic added the OSI-approved AGPLv3 license as an option alongside SSPL and Elastic License for Elasticsearch and Kibana, effectively returning to open-source licensing. However, developers who had migrated to alternatives after the 2021 license change largely did not return, with community trust having been damaged by the original switch.
In August 2023, HashiCorp relicensed Terraform, Vault, Consul, and other products from the Mozilla Public License (open source) to the Business Source License (not open source). The move prompted the creation of OpenTofu, a community fork. Mitchell Hashimoto was an individual contributor at the time, not in a leadership role making this decision.
In November 2022, developers filed a class-action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI alleging that GitHub Copilot was trained on billions of lines of publicly available code from GitHub repositories without complying with open-source license terms (GPL, MIT, etc.) requiring attribution and copyright notices. The suit sought over $9 billion in statutory damages. By May 2023, a judge dismissed 20 of 22 claims but allowed breach of contract and DMCA claims to proceed. GitHub's FAQ acknowledged that about 1% of suggestions may match training data.
In late 2022, the FSF in conjunction with the Software Freedom Conservancy released an updated report on its Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement. The principles establish that the FSF's primary goal in GPL enforcement is to bring about compliance, with legal action as a last resort. Compliance actions are primarily education and assistance processes to aid those not following the license. The FSF also updated its bylaws to require 66% board approval for any new GPL versions, strengthening stewardship of the license that underpins the free software ecosystem.
In January 2021, Elastic changed Elasticsearch and Kibana from the Apache 2.0 open-source license to a dual SSPL/Elastic License v2, motivated by dissatisfaction with AWS offering a competing managed service. The change prompted AWS to create the OpenSearch fork. Many developers migrated away, and the community felt betrayed by a bait-and-switch after building on what they believed was truly open-source software.
In 2019, the Linux Foundation, Open Invention Network (OIN), and Microsoft created the Open Source Zone with Unified Patents to challenge patents owned by Patent Assertion Entities (patent trolls) that targeted open source projects. Over five years, the initiative achieved a success rate of invalidating more than 54 PAE patents. The collaboration deepened in 2024 with additional companies contributing. This proactive defense protects open source projects from costly litigation that could undermine open source development.
reactive
In 2017, Facebook's React JavaScript library used a BSD+Patents license that included a patent retaliation clause, meaning users who sued Facebook for any patent infringement would lose their license to use React. The Apache Software Foundation banned the license, calling it incompatible with Apache projects. After widespread community backlash and organizations threatening to migrate away, Facebook relicensed React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js to the standard MIT license in September 2017.
Evan You created Vue.js in 2014, which grew to become one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. In 2016, he became one of the first developers to sustain full-time open source work through Patreon and later GitHub Sponsors, pioneering a model for independent open source sustainability. All his projects (Vue, Vite, Vitest) are MIT licensed.
In 1989, Richard Stallman published the first version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the first copyleft license. The GPL ensured that software and its derivatives remain free, preventing proprietary capture. The GPL became the most widely used free software license, used by Linux, Git, and thousands of other projects, fundamentally shaping the open-source ecosystem.
In 1983, Stallman announced the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system. In 1985, he founded the Free Software Foundation and authored the GPL, establishing the copyleft licensing model that became foundational to open source software.