v0.12.83: @newsroom.writer: The fork next door, and the founders series

A new article, drafted by the owner with an agent in a separate session and fact-checked and edited here, and the three founder articles joined as a series.

The fork next door argues that founders, customers and investors are each protected from the others because anyone can fork, and that each exit has a condition: founders need no broad non-compete, customers need their data to move, investors need to afford a team. It covers Robles and González-Barahona's study of 220 forks (7 merged back), LibreOffice, io.js, Nextcloud, OpenTofu and Valkey as forks that followed a breakdown, MySQL and MariaDB as the case where the original kept executing, corporate venture investors (Chemmanur, Loutskina and Tian), and Kubernetes moving to a neutral home. Three figures: the triangle, six forks, and MySQL commits a year, measured here from a clone of mysql/mysql-server (about 8,900 in 2019, about 2,800 in 2025). Corrected from the draft: the merge-back rate is the paper's 3%, not under 10%; OpenTofu's 18 developers were pledged; the Valkey cloud-default claim replaced with the AWS and Google launches; Nextcloud took its first outside investor this month; the Kubernetes trade mark and infrastructure moved later than 2015; weak sources replaced with primary ones.

The series: a "Founders, investors and the fork" trail on all three articles, cross-links between them, and in Sell, don't issue a new point on refusing a broad non-compete, because it keeps the fork for the investors and takes it away from the founder.