Letter No. 16 · Saturday 12 September 2026 · The ecosystem
Self-hosted software looks like a product you install. It is also a small economy: someone writes the code, someone pays the server bill, and someone can take the whole project and start again.
- A licence is what makes a fork possible: the GPL and the AGPL require any copy to keep the same terms.
- Self-hosting shifts the cost from a subscription to a server, an administrator and backups.
- Stars measure attention on GitHub, not the number of people keeping a project alive.
a full copy of a repository at one point in time Fork · GPLv2, derivatives keep the same terms MySQL licence
A fork is a legal copy
A fork is a complete copy of a project's code at one moment, placed under a new name and a new maintainer. The licence decides whether that copy is legal. MySQL ships under GPLv2, which lets anyone reuse and redistribute the code as long as the new version keeps the same terms. That single rule lets a group of developers leave with the code instead of starting from an empty file. MIT and Apache 2.0 permit the same move with fewer conditions. Open source means the source is readable and reusable; it does not mean the software costs nothing.
Three forks, three triggers
MariaDB split from MySQL in 2009, after Oracle agreed to buy Sun Microsystems. LibreOffice was announced on 28 September 2010 by The Document Foundation, after Oracle took over OpenOffice.org. Nextcloud left ownCloud in 2016, founded by ownCloud's own creator, Frank Karlitschek, and licensed AGPL v3. The pattern repeats: a company changes owner or direction, the community reads the licence, and the licence says the code can leave. Each fork then needed its own servers, its own release schedule and its own maintainers, most of whom were volunteers at the start.
Who pays for the server
Self-hosting moves a cost, it does not remove it. Nextcloud GmbH, founded in 2016 in Stuttgart, sells subscriptions and employs core developers. Smaller projects lean on Open Collective and on GitHub Sponsors, which opened in 2019 for direct funding of maintainers. A company that self-hosts runs its own machine: upgrades, backups, security patches, an administrator. GitHub stars record attention, not adoption. A repository can draw tens of thousands of them and still be kept alive by two part-time maintainers. Source Playbook is one place where these projects are tracked and explained in plain English.
SOURCE PLAYBOOK LETTER — open source, AI and tech, explained for people who do not write code.