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Art deco illustration of historical records

Lessons Learned

What happens when licensing goes wrong

I've watched licensing disputes unfold in real time for decades. Some were predictable. Some blindsided everyone. All of them taught us something.

These aren't just historical curiosities. They're warnings. Every one of these incidents involved smart people who thought they understood licensing—until they didn't. Study them, and maybe you won't repeat their mistakes.

The Cases

The Classics

These shaped how we think about open source licensing:

The Corporate Pivots

When open source business models collide with cloud providers:

The Quirks and Edge Cases

Smaller incidents with useful lessons:

The Pattern

If you read all of these, you'll notice recurring themes:

  1. License ambiguity creates risk. Unclear terms eventually get tested in court or in the marketplace.

  2. License changes alienate communities. Every restrictive relicensing has spawned forks.

  3. Business models and licenses are intertwined. When the business model doesn't work, the license gets blamed.

  4. The community has a long memory. Trust, once lost, doesn't come back easily.

  5. Enforcement is rare but real. Most license violations go unchallenged. The ones that get enforced become precedent.

A Note on Perspective

I've tried to present these fairly, but I have opinions. I've watched friends lose companies to licensing disputes. I've seen projects I loved get abandoned after relicensing. These aren't just abstract legal questions to me.

Take what's useful, form your own judgments, and learn from other people's mistakes. That's cheaper than making your own.