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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Then the community forks the OSS project and you lose control/struggle to maintain parity/mindshare. Gogs/Gitea, VIM/Neovim, Bitwarden/Vaultwarden...

The ones that succeed keep the community happy and either focus on adding value on top (open core, don't give away the special sauce) or deliver half assed products (package up the community leftovers and hope support contracts/services fill in the gaps).

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> Then the community forks the OSS project and you lose control/struggle to maintain parity/mindshare

That shouldn't matter if you're making a superior product.

Well, yeah. So what's in it for them?

Free QA/testing, a community of users who can submit patches, word-of-mouth marketing, a large install-base, opportunity to sell support to high-value clients.

What's in it for them, if it turns out the community forks their project and do it better than them?

I don't see it as a sound argument.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there open source licenses that don’t permit unauthorized distribution? If so, couldn’t they safely release the source code without worrying about competition from forks?

> Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there open source licenses that don’t permit unauthorized distribution? If so, couldn’t they safely release the source code without worrying about competition from forks?

They would still be faced with knock-offs that either copy code or violate the license; Paint.net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.net#History) is an example of this happening for an open source project.

That would be shared source, not open source. Disallowing unauthorised distribution contradicts the definition of "open source".

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