Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

Summary

Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! By Jonathan CorbetSeptember 5, 2025 OSS EU Like almost all human endeavors, open-source software development involves a range of power dynamics. Companies, developers, and users are all concerned with the power to influence the direction of the software — and, often, to profit from it. At the 2025 Open Source Summit Europe, Dawn Foster talked about how those dynamics can play out, with an eye toward a couple of tactics — rug pulls and forks — that are available to try to shift power in one direction or another. Power dynamics Since the beginning of history, Foster began, those in power have tended to use it against those who were weaker. In the days of feudalism, control of the land led to exploitation at several levels. In the open-source world, the large cloud providers often seem to have the most power, which they use against smaller companies. Contributors and maintainers often have less power than even the smaller companies, and users have less power yet. We have built a world where it is often easiest to just use whatever a cloud provider offers, even with open-source software. Those providers may not contribute back to the projects they turn into services, though, upsetting the smaller companies that are, likely as not, doing the bulk of the work to provide the software in question in the first place. Those companies can have a power of their own, however: the power to relicense the software. Pulling the rug out from under users of the software in this way can change the balance of power with regard to cloud providers, but it leaves contributors and users in a worse position than before. But there is a power at this level too: the power to fork the softwa...