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Unscheduled / post-hoc / one-off relicensing

This is probably properly outside the scope of this research, but people often suggest things like these as examples when asked for projects whose open source publication was "delayed".

  • Netscape Navigator
  • Blender
  • StarOffice
  • Qt

... and probably dozens, if not hundreds, of codebases that were released after companies that were developing them shut down. (But some people say Blender does not belong in this category.)

Other examples shared with us that seem to have been "unscheduled":

  • Stackrocks, 3scale, Quay.io, and other Red Hat acquisitions
  • Kallisto
  • MS-DOS early versions (!!)
  • UNIX (the original one from Bell Labs)
  • TUIPEER

Maybe more ambiguous cases:

  • Games from id software (routinely released/relicensed after the end of their main commercial viability, but not on a schedule and not with a public commitment to do so?)
  • Ghidra (classified government internal software to declassified open source)

Not sure

  • Aleph-Alpha has a demo as open source but proprietary licensing for the official product? https://github.com/Aleph-Alpha/magma
  • XCP-ng is just a fork of an older codebase after a proprietary upstream relicensing?