State of Open Con 2025

Many popular OSS projects are owned and driven by corporations, and in today's difficult economic climate, those companies are under increasing pressure to protect their businesses or show stronger returns for investors. One response to this pressure has been the relicensing of popular projects to more restrictive licenses despite there not being consistent evidence that this generates improved financial outcomes. In some cases, this relicensing has resulted in a hard fork of the original project. Both the relicensing and the resulting fork create turmoil for the users of that project and the community of contributors. The audience will gain an appreciation of why relicensing results in hostile forks and how to think about this issue when selecting projects for contribution or usage.