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HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

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Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#3

Post by jauntywundrkind »

It would be so lovely to see a return of direct to consumer OSS. OSS being so industrially purposed has kind of obscured some of the noble cause of the project, has made the virtue of sharing & cooperation less evident. That's easy to let ride when it's all just devs consuming packages. But once software starts being user facing I feel like the closed proprietary path is much more noticeable of a boundary.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#4

Post by gymbeaux »

When I think of OSS companies, I think of financially-precarious companies like Mozilla (nonprofit so it’s kind of maneuverable), and companies like RedHat and Canonical that rely solely on donations/enterprise support contracts.

So I would suppose that his take warrants a “duh.”

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#5

Post by api »

This has been brewing for a very long time, and he's by no means the only person or even the best person making these points.

Open source dates back to the 1980s but really took flight in the 1990s with Linux, Linux distributions, and the mainstreaming of the Internet. Back then it was mostly a movement for software freedom and openness in contrast to closed source software like Windows and macOS. While it obviously didn't displace closed source software, it definitely played a huge role in preventing the Internet from being "embraced, extended, and extinguished" by Microsoft among others.

Without the open source movement we might be using the Microsoft Enterprise Internet with IIS as the only viable web server and NT as the only viable server OS. Imagine that hellscape. We also wouldn't have modern cloud, single board computers with reasonably open software, and loads of other things.

Yet the world has changed radically since the 1990s. Today the major form of closed software is cloud SaaS. SaaS usually runs on top of open source software but in terms of openness and freedom it's a profoundly more closed model than old-school closed source. SaaS is the ultimate in closed. You get to understand and control nothing, not even your own data in most cases.

Against this model open source software is offering zero resistance. In fact it's helping facilitate this ultimate lock-down of compute by providing free labor to SaaS companies. That's its primary role now.

I've seen this situation developing for going on fifteen years, but it seems like it's difficult to get the open source community to even consider the issue. The mentality is completely stuck in the 1990s.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#8

Post by a1o »

The Open Innovation model described in the book by Henry Chesbrough was super charged by Open Source. I think moving out of the open source model is a mistake that would make things move slow for the ones not playing it. Nowadays, when I think in software that I have to build with and have no access to source, all I am reminded is the bureaucracy of dealing with licenses where a much preferable approach is to have payments for support disconnected from this. If this is really some way things will go, I wonder if someone will make standardized drm for software libraries. Honestly, I hope I don’t have to develop with these things.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#9

Post by jakelazaroff »

I mean, HashiCorp is one of the companies leading the charge on that, are they not? They chose to stop using open source licenses for new versions of their software. That’s certainly their prerogative — they obviously decided that being an open source company didn’t fit their business model — but don’t then turn around and blame the Linux Foundation for picking up the ball that you dropped when you couldn’t make the numbers work.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#10

Post by WestCoastJustin »

This is a dumb title for a good article. In that it makes is seem like he is talking about OSS software. The software that powers the entire Silicon Valley tech empire. Linux and OSS power Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, right down to your 1-2 person startups.

He's not talking about that -- he's talking about open source software sales model used by companies like Redhat and HashiCorp. The threat here is that you're developing in the open, trying to up-sell enterprise features, professional services, and support. Then you have XYZ startup appear, they take your open-source code, repackages it and then sells enterprise features, professional services, and support. They basically leech off your OSS code and community, provide nothing back, and actively compete with you. It's brutal.

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