>I am grateful for the contributions of the community. Every Clojure release incorporates many contributions. [...] Open source is a no-strings-attached gift, and all participants should recognize it as such.
>The time to re-examine preconceptions about open source is right now. Morale erosion amongst creators is a real thing.
Sad that it has to be said. I think as a creator you need to brace yourself for the reality of what it means to offer something to the world. There is a sort of normal distribution of consumers and some can be surprisingly toxic.
- Game developers
- Authors of popular novels that have yet to finish ("GRRM is not your bitch")
- Star Wars
With a game, movie or another peice of culture, the law can hinder your fork. If you want to make the Star Wars episode you wish had existed, you have to navigate the tretcherous waters of fair use and copyright. There are also plenty of tales of indie game developers attempting to remix a game from their childhood on a new platform only to get a cease and desist as soon as the rights holders get wind of it.
You are not entitled to make money off it, just like you aren't entitled to make money off that open source project you forked.
Whether you are entitled to write fanfic is not a straightforward case. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction documents, some authors allow it, some don't, and fanfic sites pay close attention to who does. The fact that you can write Star Wars fanfic is not entitled under law, it is entitled by implicit or explicit permission from the copyright holder. Star Wars is OK. Pern? Not so much.
Oh, and sometimes you can both write and sell fanfic legally, no matter what the copyright holder thinks. For a famous example, Bored of the Rings is legal because it is marked as parody.
Moving on to open source, you are even more squarely wrong. The definition of open source, as found at https://opensource.org/osd-annotated, in item #6 says that commercial use must be allowed. In other words anyone is free to try to make money off of that open source project they forked as long as they follow the license.
In fact the term "open source" was invented as part of a marketing campaign to encourage the use of free software for commercial purposes. Far from "you can't make money from this", the whole intent was to encourage people to try to make money from it. And seeing that you could, to encourage businesses to make more of it! (This marketing campaign was successful, which is why you both have heard of the term some 20 years later, and everyone uses open source software.)
Now the license may restrict what business models are feasible. For example you can't edit GPL software then sell it as proprietary. But that is a MAY, not a MUST. As an example, selling relabeled BSD software commercially is both explicitly allowed and occasionally encouraged.