3 popular apps that ditched open source (and the free tools that replaced them)

Published Jul 29, 2026, 6:30 AM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. It’s always a little sad to learn that a favorite free and open-source app has gone closed source—or worse, started costing money. But sometimes it’s inevitable. Developers need to pay the bills, companies need sustainable growth, and maintaining a public codebase takes real time and effort. The good news is that when a project was once open source, the code from before it went closed source is still out there. Motivated developers can pick it up and continue building on it. Here are three popular FOSS (free and open-source software) projects that went closed source, along with the open-source alternatives that emerged to take their place. Reddit The front page of the internet was once FOSS Credit: Reddit | Issarawat Tattong / Shutterstock Today, most people know Reddit as one of the world's biggest social networks. However, what many don't realize is that, for nearly a decade, Reddit was FOSS, and its source code was publicly available. Reddit launched in 2005 as a simple link-sharing website created by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. In 2008, years after rewriting much of the site in Python, Reddit released its source code as open source. At the time, that aligned with the company's philosophy of transparency and allowed developers to learn from—or even contribute to—the platform. However, as Reddit grew into one of the internet's largest social networks, that openness became harder to maintain. By 2017, the company stopped publicly maintaining its source code, explaining that the public repository had become increasingly difficult to keep in sync with its rapidly evolving internal codebase. Shipping new features and infrastructure changes had become slower, and the public repository no longer reflected the production version anyway. That said, the move didn't suddenly make Reddit anti-developer. The company still publishes numerous open-source tools and contributes to other open-source projects, but the platform itself has remained closed source ever since. Lemmy is the new open source Reddit If you want the closest open-source Reddit alternative, Lemmy is your best bet. It's a decentralized discussion platform where anyone can host their own instance while still interacting with users on other servers. You get familiar features like communities, voting, comments, moderation tools, and user accounts—without a single company controlling the entire platform. Emby A chapter closed—but another one opened My Emby home screen.Credit: Joe Fedewa / How-To Geek Before it became a premium media server, Emby was a fully community-driven open-source project. In fact, the software had humble beginnings as a mere plugin for Windows Media Center called Media Browser, which helped people organize their movie and TV collections. However, as streaming devices became more popular, the project gradually evolved into a standalone media server and rebranded itself as Emby in 2014. Now, it was still open source at the time and introduced powerful features like library management, metadata scraping, on-the-fly transcoding, and multi-device support. All of these amazing features at a zero dollar price tag made it one of, if not the most popular media servers of its era and attracted a large community. However, as the software grew more sophisticated, the developers found it increasingly difficult to manage outside contributions, improve security, and keep the project sustainable. In 2018, Emby officially transitioned to a closed-source development model. It adopted a freemium business model, keeping its core features free while locking advanced features behind the paid Emby Premiere subscription. The decision proved controversial among long-time users and sparked one of the most significant forks in the home media server community. Jellyfin is the new open source Emby Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To GeekCredit: Patrick Campanale / How-To GeekCredit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek When Emby went closed source, members of the community forked the last open-source release to create Jellyfin. Today, Jellyfin is widely regarded as the leading open-source media server. Nearly all the features locked behind Emby Premiere are available in Jellyfin for free. In many ways, Jellyfin carries forward the original vision that made early Emby so popular. Paint.NET It wants to be free, just not open Paint.NET is one of the best-known lightweight image editors for Windows. The project began in 2004 as a computer science project by Rick Brewster, then a student at Washington State University, who envisioned it as a modern replacement for Microsoft Paint. However, it quickly outgrew its academic roots and became one of Windows' most popular free image editors. The early versions were released as free and open-source software under a modified MIT license. However, Brewster repeatedly found people taking the code, rebranding Paint.NET under different names, selling modified versions, or distributing malware that exploited the project's reputation. Frustrated by how his software was being misused, he closed the source code in 2009. Brewster argued the move was necessary to prevent plagiarism, reduce user confusion, and protect users from malicious modified versions. That said, unlike many FOSS projects that went closed source to generate revenue, Paint.NET is still completely free to use. You can download it at no cost from the official website. Granted, a paid version is also available on the Microsoft Store, but it isn't a premium edition with extra features. It offers the same features and interface as the free version and simply gives users another way to support the developer while benefiting from easier installation and automatic updates. Pinta is the open source Paint.NET Credit: David J. Buck / How-To GeekCredit: David J. Buck / How-To Geek While Paint.NET remains free to use, if you want a truly FOSS image editor, Pinta is the closest alternative. Interestingly, Pinta was created in early 2010 as an open-source project designed to recreate the Paint.NET experience. It recreates much of Paint.NET's straightforward interface while remaining fully open source and cross-platform, running on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Just because it was open source doesn't mean it'll stay open source Open source doesn't guarantee a project will remain open forever. As software becomes more successful, developers often face new challenges—paying the bills, preventing abuse, managing larger codebases, or protecting their work from bad actors. While this can often motivate moving to a closed-source model, the beauty of FOSS is that it refuses to die. Even if the core team decides to make future versions closed source, every line of code released under an open-source license remains available. If the community disagrees with that decision (or any decision for that matter), they can fork the last open version and continue development independently—exactly what happened with Emby and Jellyfin.