Get the latest tech news

Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

Like almost all human endeavors, open-source software development involves a range of power dyn [...]

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. The problem often comes down to the simple fact that companies have to answer to their investors, and that often leads to pressure to relicense the software they have created in order to increase revenue. Looking at the numbers Foster has spent some time analyzing rug pulls, forks, and what happens thereafter; a lot of the results are available for download as Jupyter notebooks.

Get the Android app