Every few months somebody publishes a “state of open source licensing” piece, and most of them aren’t worth your time. This one is.
Gabriel Anhaia’s Open Source in 2026: The Fork Wars Are Getting Ugly pulls the year’s licensing disasters — OnlyOffice trying to weaponize AGPLv3 §7 against Nextcloud, IBM-flavored HashiCorp grinding away at OpenTofu contributors, Cal.com’s “AI made us close the source” pivot, the chardet maintainer using Claude to launder LGPL into MIT — into a single coherent narrative. The thesis: forks are no longer the ultimate community remedy. They are now the opening move in a multi-year legal grind, and the side with the better-funded litigation department wins by attrition rather than by being right.
He is correct. Read it.
The PostgreSQL community has, so far, been spared the worst of this. PostgreSQL itself remains under the PostgreSQL License, the foundation ownership story is clean, and nobody has a credible relicensing path even if they wanted one. But the extension ecosystem is an entirely different conversation, and the next round of “actually, our extension is now BUSL” announcements is coming. Worth keeping the playbook from Anhaia’s piece in mind when it does.