Pattern: Open-Source Bait-and-Switch — Accumulate Community, Then Go Closed-Source

The Register / FOSS Force·medium signal

Google's Gemini CLI trajectory — 100K stars, 6,000 community PRs, then enterprise-only with a closed-source replacement — is becoming a recognizable pattern in AI tooling. Builders relying on open-source AI CLI tools should evaluate: does the maintainer have a commercial incentive to go closed? Is there a credible fork path? For Gemini CLI specifically, the Apache 2.0 license means the existing code is forkable, but without API access the value decays. The lesson: open weights and open protocols (like MCP) are more durable bets than open-source wrappers around proprietary APIs.