Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

For nearly all open source projects, we are free riders. We use them and don’t contribute anything back. Open source is not about fair exchange; it’s about gift-giving and copying other people’s homework.

If you choose to give gifts to the world, that’s great, but you should go into it with your eyes open and not expect anything back. The world includes a lot of terrible people and you’re giving them gifts too. It’s okay to change your mind.

Calling it a “rug pull” when a software vendor relicenses seems like biased language. We still have all the gifts they gave us. It’s unfortunate that they changed direction, but nothing lasts forever.

“We use them and don’t contribute anything back.”

This is not, strictly speaking, true. The example projects saw contribution in terms of code, testing, documentation, and - most importantly - marketing and evangelism.

These projects are not things put up on GitHub as a convenience that people just happened to adopt: the companies in question spent great sums of money encouraging adoption, usually with developer evangelists on staff who’d preach the technical advantages and talk about benefits of the licensing to convince people to use them.

It’s naive at best to position that as simple “gift culture” and claim it’s biased to call it what it really is: a rug pull.

In the case of Redis the company promised explicitly it would always keep the license for Redis core: until it didn’t. That’s a rug pull, plain and simple.

Accepting code and other contributions, encouraging other FOSS projects to rely on a project and then relicensing? Rug pull.

Show me a project that was not aggressively marketed for adoption using open source as a selling point and I’ll agree that’s not a rug pull. If Acme Corp just happened to have a GitHub repo for something under a FOSS license and people organically found and adopted it, okay. I’m not aware of any such examples, though.

"We didn't contribute anything" is mostly true for most of us. For people who do work on open source projects, it's still true for all the projects you don't work on, which far outnumber the ones where you do.

It doesn't have to be that way though, companies and folks with money can give back and help projects they depend on to become sustainable. Start an Open Source Program Office, audit all the software you run, including dependencies, and make sure that they are all viable, by contributing back with dev hours and funding, and advocate that other related companies do the same.

I think it's fair to recognize that giving gifts, especially repeatedly over a long time, can create an obligation as people become dependent on those gifts and alternatives they might have relied on otherwise disappear or never materialize in the first place.

And that's before going into the effort of other people that goes into making an open source project successful but who don't have any legal ownership over the source code and thus no legal say in the future of it.