> I can't think of very many, if any, examples in computing history where a project, open source or not, followed the path of "dominating a domain" -> "sponsor

> I can't think of very many, if any, examples in computing history where a project, open source or not, followed the path of "dominating a domain" -> "sponsor does something crappy" -> "the community rallies around a fork" -> "the fork becomes a dominating force in its domain". In addition to LibreOffice which you mention, once upon a time the classic example was GCC vs EGCS; the fork was so successful that it became the original thing. It might be harder to consider Firefox an example, since Chrome has taken over, but it was also a fork of Mozilla because Mozilla was too heavy under the weight of Netscape-mandated legacy features. The X.org fork of XFree86 took over because the project behind XFree86 brought in a licence that was not GPL compatible. In only one of these cases was the sponsor a for-profit company - and it was basically dead - but I think that's because it's a fundamentally recent phenomenon that for-profit companies feel free to release their source code under a free licence. There just hasn't been the time. It takes time to develop a good project, attract a generation of users who take it as the norm, betray trust and motivated people to fork. If the time wasn't there, then they might just pick up what they'd used before or develop something genuinely new.