On the topic of open sourcing your core business, founders often worry that a competitor is going to take their source code, fork it, and directly compete with

On the topic of open sourcing your core business, founders often worry that a competitor is going to take their source code, fork it, and directly compete with them. But, is there an actual example of this happening for real and the fork winning out and killing the incumbent in the market? I mean there’s a fork of Signal that doesn’t require a phone number (which is Signal’s heinous transgression if you poll HN) and we’re all still using Signal. And all you have to do to prevent bigcorp taking your stuff is slap the [A]GPL on it for “free users” (while still allowing others to purchase the source code under a more permissive license should they require it).