Based on quick googling, they all follow a very similar pattern. The original is permissively licensed. After a decade of growth and popularity, it's relicensed as source-available to prevent AWS from hosting it and harming the financials [1][2][3]. Copyleft community forks fail to get traction. A permissive, corporate-funded fork gets traction. It's adopted by the Linux Foundation and is provided on AWS. Enough users and contributors switch to make it relevant and active to this day. In the few years that pass, the permissive fork doesn't die, but it doesn't overthrow the "official" fork either. The "official" fork makes money and is still widely used. Later, it becomes dual-licensed under a copyleft license [4]. The CEOs say that they've always wanted to stay open-source, and the goal of the license change was to force AWS to fork [1][2].
It's hard to tell whether the permissive forks will overthrow the "official" dual-licensed forks in the future. We need to wait for a decade to see.
So far, at least in this space (dev-oriented tools that started as permissive), it seems like:
- Permissive corporate forks get vastly more investment and interest, and quickly beat copyleft community forks (confirming the article).
- Companies prefer more community-friendly licenses over full-on proprietary licenses (confirming the article). The originals are relicensed as source-available to cause the fork without alienating the community too much. The AWS forks are permissively licensed to get outside contributions and attract the community.
AWS, obviously, profits the most from permissive code. That's because it doesn't really care about the code itself, and profits from hosting it instead. It reminds me of this timeless post about "commoditizing complements": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/. Now I see the connection between this idea and the original post. Permissive code "unlocks" more of the "adjacent value", and that's why it's more desirable by most entities.
Another post about corporate investment that I found while googling the topic: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2338938/follow-the-cloud-m...
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3499400/elastics-return-to...
[2] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3975620/redis-bets-big-on-...
[3] https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/08/hashicorp-adopts-bsl/
[4] The latest versions of Elasticsearch and Redis are dual-licensed under AGPL. BSL'ed Terraform versions become available under MPL after 4 years from the publishing date: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/b145fbcaadf0fa....