Open Source in 2025: Strap In, Disruption Straight Ahead
Look for new tensions to arise in the New Year over licensing, the open source AI definition, security and compliance, and how to pay volunteer maintainers.
The open source software world can feel like a bubble at times, one in which people who love to solve problems go and tinker with solutions, share ideas freely and build global communities of contributors. They gather at conferences, meetups and online to praise each other’s hard work and innovation, and remind each other how awesome they are.
But outside forces can sometimes shake that bubble like a snow globe. In March, Redis adjusted the licensing for its open source in-memory data store, which prompted the creation of a Linux Foundation-supported fork, Valkey.
In December, the community around Puppet, an Infrastructure as Code tool, announced plans to fork it in the wake of November news that Perforce, its owner, would “ship any new binaries and packages developed by [its] team to a private, hardened and controlled location. Community contributors will have free access to this private repo under the terms of an end-user license agreement (EULA) for development use.”
In other words, Puppet will now be source-available, not open source.
The trend of widely used open source software moving to more restrictive licensing isn’t new. But the current wave started, arguably, with HashiCorp’s August 2023 decision to pull Terraform (and subsequently other products, like Nomad) back from the open source world, assigning them to Business Source License v1.1. A community is growing around the fork of Terraform, OpenTofu. Likewise for OpenBao, a fork of HashiCorp’s Vault secrets manager created at the end of 2023.
Users are truly experiencing some “turbulation” — a word Matt Butcher, CEO and co-founder of Fermyon Technologies, coined about the open source licensing dramas of 2023 and 2024 — a mashup of “turbulence” and “tribulation.” His company was hit by turbulation caused by HashiCorp’s decision, since Fermyon uses HashiCorp’s Nomad. Butcher told The New Stack (TNS): “We literally ended up asking them for exceptions to bits and pieces, because we were running a patched version of Nomad.”
But as a startup founder, he is watching the licensing decisions carefully. Fermyon, which focuses on WebAssembly, has both open source projects and paid enterprise-level products.
