I'm not gonna say forking is always the answer, or that it doesn't sometimes suck for the project as a whole when some people go one direction and some people go another, but I'm inclined to agree with the spirit of your comment that the ability to do so is a feature of OSS, not a bug.

This is a blog post written from one side (and a side I'm generally more sympathetic to) but no doubt when it is a major break between two factions, especially "founders" versus "maintainers" there are obviously two sides to the story, and the great thing is that one side doesn't always have to "win"

I came here to say this. This is the strength of the OSS model! There are a lot of ways that I believe OSS to be flawed (mainly fragmentation) but I'm not a dev and I'm not fixing it so I don't complain. But when I see things like this it makes me realize that there are huge upsides to Open Source licenses that make this possible.

Another case in point: CentOS and its new forks that are emerging.

You are expecting that both projects will thrive? Maybe. I'm not familiar with the product, so I couldn't say what the chances are, but it doesn't seem obvious to me in this scenario.

What "system", besides a hostile takeover of a software project?

Whatever the intentions of any party the result is a OSS codebase splitting in two because they don't agree on the future of the project. That is exactly what is supposed to happen when that problem arises.

How? Users [0] are free to either go with October's new direction or switch to WinterCMS, which seems to be fully compatible and a minimal change as of now. Thanks to this, users can now actually choose which way they prefer, instead of being forced in either direction!

[0] As in "developers using the CMS"; for actual users of projects based on the CMS, absolutely nothing changes.

It mentions their move to paid only on the homepage.

Paid doesn't mean proprietary.

No, but you could click one link and read a short blog article - the word proprietary is just a few hundred words in.

Calling this a hostile takeover is being extremely overdramatic. There was a fork.

Are you talking about the fork or the original project? I agree the original project's move is a bit user hostile as it now requires people to pay immediately if they want to continue receiving updates. However, I don't see how this can be 'bordering on malware'

That being said, it is the right of the maintainers to fork the software as allowed by the Open Source license the original code was under. Users now have the choice of paying the original company or using the free version with a new name. I fail to see how this is user-hostile.

As someone who doesn't own software I buy from major companies, but continues to collectively own old versions of October CMS, I don't feel much malware. There's still a good deal of actual software here.

What is hostile? If they own the IP they can do whatever they want with it.

If someone points a gun at you, I doubt you would consider whether or not they owned it before evaluating if their actions were hostile.

How is it a hostile takeover? One group has decided to continue development in a different direction. Others have decided they want to continue on the current path.