The two specific cases cited in the post to which I responded were Docker and Terraform.
I think there is a great deal of evidence that people are using alternatives at scale.
Let's take a look at some other examples: OpenOffice, Node, Hudson.
Of course, there are plenty of cases where forks have not thrived. But that is not really the question. The question is, can you show me a single closed-source project that did something highly objectionable to a large portion of the userbase that was then rescued by the userbase?
Can you explain why I should choose IIS over Apache just because there is a possibility that somebody could fork Apache? If either IIS or Apache decided tomorrow that they would no longer support TLS, but only support eeeTLS, why would the Apache situation be worse just because it is OSS and some users might fork it to keep TLS capabilities? It seems obvious to me that in fact Apache is the wiser choice in that regard.
I think there is a great deal of evidence that people are using alternatives at scale.
Let's take a look at some other examples: OpenOffice, Node, Hudson.
Of course, there are plenty of cases where forks have not thrived. But that is not really the question. The question is, can you show me a single closed-source project that did something highly objectionable to a large portion of the userbase that was then rescued by the userbase?
Can you explain why I should choose IIS over Apache just because there is a possibility that somebody could fork Apache? If either IIS or Apache decided tomorrow that they would no longer support TLS, but only support eeeTLS, why would the Apache situation be worse just because it is OSS and some users might fork it to keep TLS capabilities? It seems obvious to me that in fact Apache is the wiser choice in that regard.