In OSS projects the source code is available in general, not “on request”. On request means they can deny you the code, or provide you with a version that isn’t

In OSS projects the source code is available in general, not “on request”. On request means they can deny you the code, or provide you with a version that isn’t what they distribute. Also, if you fork an OSS project and promote it under the same name you’d be (IMO rightfully) criticized, but if you fork and promote it under a different name, and clearly credit the original, I believe most people wouldn’t care. At worst your project gets no attention, or maybe the owner cares, but if your clone is superior people will move to it. This has precedent, albeit with dead projects, like tui-rs becoming ratatui; with projects that became closed-source, like MySQL; with small patches of big projects, like linux and firefox; and where the fork has a small audience. But active projects that aren't becoming closed-source probably tend not to have substantially different, popular forks, simply because the effort to maintain such a fork to par with the original is too much, and not adequately justified by the motive. Moreover, it’s legal to fork an OSS project and start distributing it on your own. If the project is truly open-source and not copyleft, it’s even legal to close-source and sell your fork. It’s legal to directly copy parts of the open-source project into your competing project, with attribution, rather than having to “clean-room engineer” or find a different algorithm to avoid being accused of copyright. It’s legal to provide “third-party” support to the open-source project that is superior to the owner’s first-party support they are trying to monetize. This seems to me the crux of DeValt’s argument: if you create an open-source project you don’t own the project identity. You own the name, but that doesn't mean much, because someone can fork the project with a similar name and everyone can informally know it as “new [your project’s name]”. You absolutely don’t own the code legally. And people will say and act as if you own the project, but only if you don’t abandon the project or try to make it closed-source; because it’s a lot more effort to hard-fork a project with an active maintainer, which will have no initial audience and constantly need to be synced or fall behind, especially when you can just create a pull request. It’s true that most open-source projects have one repository and an “in-group” that are de-facto “owners”, but ultimately their ownership is conditional on people’s acceptance. If the people switch to a competitor who literally copies their code, the original owners have no power to stop them, as has happened to MySQL/MariaDB, Terraform/OpenTofu, and Redis/Redict. This is functionally different than legal ownership of “source available” code, which may be legally protected from derivation, and especially “open core” where there are parts of the code (blobs) you physically can’t modify or in some cases even use outside the main distribution.