>> A some point the company says "you know what, we like this software so much that we're going to fork it, but the fork isn't going to be free or open source. It's going to be just ours, and we're not going to share the improvements we made"

Right. So at that point all those contributing developers are free to fork, and maintain the fork. You have just as much control as you always did.

And of course being MIT or GPL doesn't make a difference, the company is permitted to change the license either way. [1]

So here's the thing, folk are free to use the company product or not. Folk are free to fork or not.

In practice of course the company version tends to win because products need revenue to survive. And OSS has little to zero revenue. (The big revenue comes from, you know, companies who typically sell commercial software.)

Even with the outcome you hypothesize (and clearly that is a common outcome) OSS is still ahead because they have the code up to the fork. And yes, they may have contributed to earn this fork.

But projects are free to change license. That's just built into how licenses work. Assuming that something will be GPL or MIT or whatever [2] forever is on you, not them.

[1] I'm assuming CLA us in play because without that your explanation won't work.

[2] yes, I think GPL sends a signal of intention more than MIT, but it's just a social signal, it doesn't mean it can't change. Conversely making it GPL makes it harder for other developers to adopt in the first place since most are working in non-GPL environments.

> Right. So at that point all those contributing developers are free to fork, and maintain the fork. You have just as much control as you always did.

Yep. And we've seen this happen. Eg, MariaDB forked off from MySQL. Illumos forked from Solaris. Etc. Its not a nice thing to have to do, but its hardly a doomsday situation.