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Comment by Expurple | Hacker News Reader

Unless it's a heavily-modified proprietary fork, the cloud providers are only "eating" your profits. Not the share of the project itself. Profit isn't the top priority for everyone. I just want to have quality free software that I can use for my tasks. The more companies contribute and support it - the better.

And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably

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> And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably

Do you have any examples of this?

No, I can't remember any dead proprietary forks that would support that idea.

But somewhat, I can't remember any counterexamples either. I mean, a proprietary fork killing the permissive original. I can only remember:

- AppGet vs WinGet. But that's one permissive program killing another.

- The proprietary build of VSCode. But it's basically "a set of patches" on top of a still-maintained permissive base. And its popularity is at least somewhat dependent on the existence of that permissive base.

They don't tend to "kill" the original, they just force them into "source available" licenses. Wikipedia has stuff like MariaDB, MongoDB, Sentry, Redis, etc. as some examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

If I understand correctly, Redis-the-permissive-project wasn't threatened by any proprietary fork. What happened is that the financials of its original authors were threatened by AWS hosting Redis as a service. It's not the same as a modified proprietary fork becoming more popular than the original.

Redis was relicensed as "source available", and then that license change led to a fork. But the most prominent fork isn't proprietary. It's a permissive one, called Valkey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44653130. That's actually a good example of an in-demand permissive project changing maintainers and staying relevant under a permissive license.

An interesting thing to see in the future is whether Redis ("source available" + AGPL) or Valkey (permissive) "wins" in the long term.

Too lazy to google the details regarding the other projects.

Anything hosted on a cloud service is necessarily a proprietary fork: they have to in order to integrate it into their infra. It's not the case they're just loading the docker image and calling it a day.

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