All this license hubbub is often just people not actually thinking thriving which license they want to use. “MIT sounds like a pretty good university”.

I actually think the descriptive language commonly used here is a little distorting in that regard. A copyright owner does not, and cannot, "take something closed source", it's more that they're forking the project under a new license (which granted is a specific kind of fork only they can do, everyone else has to fork under the same license). Every single bit of code up until that moment remains under the open source license, so if there is interest customers or whomever else can take that and continue the same open source project going forward, and even surpass the original holder's new proprietary effort. As a practical matter that's rare because there has to be serious interest, but it does happen. OpenZFS for example is a wonderful project that has long since eclipsed the Oracle fork of Sun's code.

In turn I also think it is often a little more complex then (from the opinion):

>"switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions"

Let's be serious: rarely are these projects getting more then a token percentage of code from contributors, let alone anything else (though Redis definitely is). It's frequently 90%+ a single-company effort, and indeed this is nearly a truism. Because if the company is only a small component of the effort vs the community it is extremely likely any attempt to do a proprietary fork will fail and the open one comprising the majority of effort will dominate, and by definition there is major interest. This doesn't make it non-irritating, but it's still a net positive, a lot of useful code was contributed open and is a much easier springboard. And it's a much MUCH better situation then the even more common proprietary-all-along-software changing terms which happens all the friggin' time, like going subscription-only. If nothing else you get a much better off ramp.

Companies forking from open source to proprietary with their projects can suck, for sure. But I think in the last year it has started to also get a little overhyped. I'd still rather have years of open source first. And again, everyone can always evaluate who owns the copyrights. Diversity is important for longevity ANYWAY too. Like, if all the effort is happening by a few devs or a single company, what happens if they get hit by a bus? Go bankrupt? Simply get old and tired of it? At some point the community has to step up, or not.