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What Happens to Relicensed Open Source Projects and Their Forks?

Contributor impact varies after projects adopt more restrictive licenses, finds CHAOSS research on Elasticsearch, Redis, Terraform and their forks.

One response to this pressure has been relicensing popular open source projects to more restrictive licenses in the hopes of generating more revenue. As with Elasticsearch, most contributions to the OpenSearch repository came from Amazon employees, however, to a lesser extent and with increases in organizational diversity over time. Since there were so few contributions from outside of the company, there was no substantial impact on the contributor community from the relicensing event, so the only people affected would likely have been Terraform users.

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