> The corp still doesn't need to take direction, nor input, nor patches from the community.
>The corp can steer the language and frameworks wherever they want. Sure, you may be able to then fork it, but is that fork going to gain any traction? Probably not.
These both apply to not-corporate projects as well.
But if it's a non-corporate project, and the lead/owner/BDFL decides to go in an evil (or just stupid) direction, and I fork it, my fork has a better chance of gaining some traction. It's not perfect, but it's somewhat better.
(Or so I suspect - I haven't ever been in that position.)
I would assume this also applies to corporate projects as well.
Perfect example: There are 2 Plex alternatives I know of that sort of fit this mold. One is called Emby that started as open source and turned into a closed source commercial product. The other Jellyfin which is (from what I can tell) an open source fork of Emby from before it went closed. Both seem to have picked up some amount of traction.
