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Comment by Stranger43 | Hacker News Reader

Yes and the problem here is that people who are not okay with proprietary forks choose an BSD license in order to seem cool, attract users or provide their own proprietary fork based on contributed code.

The controversy is not that some companies migrate to GPL or AGPL licenses but that some companies want to take a two sided contributor/maintainer relationship and turn it into an one sided contract by adding clauses that lets them prevent forking the core into product that compete with their own proprietary derivatives, which no OSI aproved license does.

As the FSF did actually release open source license that deal with the issue of cloud providers forking an opensource project without contributing code back in 2002(the actual current AGPLv2 license is from 2007) it's nonsense to say that you cannot close that hole with a OSI approved license.

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Yes but historically it was the owner of the trademark that was able to reap the bulk of any revenue. Normally the trademark was owned by the developers behind the project. Proprietary forks happened but because they didn't have the name recognition they were niche.

It seems the convenience of hosting services on the same infrastructure you already run everything else on (the cloud) outstrips the value of the trademark. This is new uncharted territory. So while it was always allowed by the license - in practice it was not as big a problem as it is today.

Except that it's not that uncommon, The Oracle/Novell conflict that gave us LibreOffice is an example of the trademark owner being derived of significant revenue by a more competent contributor who when the owner tried to take back control forked the project so successfully that the trademark on openoffice became almost worthless over the span of a few years.

The hosting providers have always absorbed a huge amount of the revenue from opensource web infrastructure without a direct payment line back to the trademark holder, as companies like SUSE and RedHat acts as successful middlemen and co-developers of a lot of frameworks they don't have the trademark on.

The idea that owning a trademark on an opensource project entitle you to the bulk of the revenue started in the VC circus about a decade ago prior to that you did it for other reasons or as a part of an consultancy operation in collaboration with a wider community. The OpenSource by license but build by a single company model expecting to operate on the shareware model of the 1980ies PC industry is what's new not the existence of non-paying hosting companies or large enterprises as potential rivals for support revenue.

And yet if you look on Google Trends you can see that Open Office has 15x the number of searches LibreOffice has. Trademarks are incredibly sticky in people's minds and forks are hard to pull off. I have experience here as I run a multi-threaded fork of Redis and people constantly ask if we have the same features.

as anecdotal evidence everyone I saw use "openoffice" in the last 6+ years was actually using libreoffice and calling it openoffice (it was in italy, so language can be a factor. openoffice has a more natural sound than libreoffice)

Part of this may have to do that OpenOffice is more enterprise-oriented, so maybe more likely to be recommended by IT people with exposure to it, and more likely to be used in an organizational context. I actually recently searched for "openoffice" when I meant "libreoffice" (which I switched to years ago). So definitely inertia in various manifestations. I think this is why some forked projects make little effort to maintain "mental continuity" (visual, naming) with their parent; it might be just as well to appear as something entirely distinct from the beginning.

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