Open Source Is Having a Meltdown and Big Tech Is Watching

Something strange is happening in open source right now. The movement that built the internet, powered Linux, funded half of GitHub, and enabled modern software is starting to crack under pressure. Maintainers are burning out, licenses are getting rewritten to block corporations, and the tension between community and profit is no longer a quiet debate. It is a full conflict playing out in public.

If you have been following the industry recently, you have seen it. Redis changed its license. HashiCorp did it too. Elastic followed. MongoDB did it before them. Meta has been accused of taking without giving back. Amazon has been called a "parasite" in forum threads. Some developers now ask whether open source has become a slow suicide mission for unpaid engineers.

How We Got Here

When open source began, the internet was smaller and collaboration was cleaner. People built things for fun, curiosity, or academic progress. Today software is the backbone of the global economy. Corporations generate billions on top of open source tools, but the people who build and maintain those tools are often unpaid and invisible. That imbalance is finally hitting a breaking point.

• Corporate extraction: Tech giants profit massively from community-built tools while giving very little back
• Maintenance fatigue: Individual maintainers handle security, bugs, and pull requests alone
• Funding failure: Donation models rarely work beyond a few big stars
• License wars: New licenses try to stop companies from freeloading

The result is what we are seeing now. A wave of relicensing. A wave of frustration. A wave of creators pulling their code from the public eye. The message is simple. We built this ecosystem, and we are tired of being treated like free labor.

The Trust Problem

This collapse is not only financial. It is cultural. Open source has always been powered by trust: trust that code is safe, trust that contributors act in good faith, and trust that companies who benefit will support. That trust is eroding. Projects are beginning to guard themselves. Some are going private. Others are launching sustainable business models just to survive.

That is why a shift is coming. Not the end of open source, but a correction. A system where important libraries and frameworks stop depending on the charity of exhausted developers. A world where sustainability is not shameful. And a world where community and business stop pretending they are not connected. Because they are.

What Happens Next

Will more licenses change? Yes. Will corporations complain? Yes. Will open source die? No. It will evolve. The future will belong to projects that balance freedom with sustainability. That may mean dual licensing, paid support tiers, or new governance models that include both community and enterprise stakeholders. It might not satisfy purists, but survival never happens by standing still.

The truth is clear. The age of free code for billion dollar companies is over. The next era of open source will still be open, but it will not be naive.