> How does anyone "control" an OSS project in the sense that you are talking about, so the ability to insert backdoors or activate kill-switches?

A government can control a piece of open source software the same way a big tech company does - with economies of scale. In other words, by throwing more money, resources, and warm bodies at their open source projects than anybody else.

The code itself might be under an open license, but project governance is free to remain self-interested and ignorant of the needs of the "community."

Any pull request accepted from outside isn't a mutual exchange of developer labor for the benefit of all, but the company successfully tricking an outside developer into doing free work for them.

Any pull request that runs counter to the interests of the company can and will be ignored or rejected, no matter how much effort was put into it or how much it would benefit other users.

Any hostile forks are going to be playing a catch-up game, as community efforts cannot outpace the resources of most large companies.

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notpushkin a day ago | parent [-]

As long as upstream is open source, forks can just keep syncing. At some point, the upstream will then usually switch to open core, or some sort of delayed open source, but often that leads to people leaving for the open forks, hopefully donating to them, too.

(Gentle reminder to subscribe to donate to a FOSS project or two that you use.)

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LexiMax 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Which projects are you referring to here?

Because in my experience, the projects that I can think of that switch to open core are those that are started by smaller businesses when a large multinational tech company starts to mess with their revenue streams.

In that case, I don't fault them in the slightest. As a matter of fact, I think these days it's now a sucker's bet to build a company around an open source product. Free software? Maybe. Source available or open core from the start? Possibly. A fully permissive license that in the outside chance my product is successful, suddenly puts me in competition with Amazon and Microsoft, so they can kill my business with my own software? Forget about it.

	▲	notpushkin 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I don’t fault them either. It’s a shitty situation to find yourself in. That said... they went with a permissive license, so they knew what they’re getting into. I think the main reason they do that is because AGPL is a turnoff for a noticeable chunk of corporate users, and you do want those users. Dual licensing should work here in theory, and does work in practice for some – no idea why we don’t see it more often. (I have a project-not-quite-startup-anymore [1] under AGPL, but I do keep around a CLA for outside contributors just in case.) [1]: https://lunni.dev/