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Note: the title is missing "unless the open source model evolves".
I wonder what that would look like. Perhaps it’s time. But the grey area is just so vast.
> HashiCorp’s CEO predicted there would be “no more open source companies in Silicon Valley” unless the community rethinks how it protects innovation.
Open source is literally a license to give the power to the people, the community, such that we allow anyone to contribute and give back. It is not a tool to "protect (your) innovation". It is a very self oriented move built on the greed inherent in capitalism. Basically the opposite of open source and tangentially copyleft.
I think a lot of people forget, especially the newer generations, that open source is not some "good boy points" or graceful gesture you do to others. It's not about you doing a "kind gesture" to the community, open source is a political move to use copyright law against itself to give the ownership right to anyone. Many seem to look past that, and try to seek out a middle ground between "my innovation" and getting the usage/praise from having the code be labelled as open-source. You can even see the Hashicorp CEO misuse the open-source label pretty regularly.
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.”
This is now IBM.
Also donations =/= support contracts from a revenue generation standpoint (mostly looking at Canonical in this case).
Companies like Hashicorp are better compared with other OSS core companies like Confluent, Kong, Sysdig, and Hortonworks (talk about a throwback).
Note: the title is missing "unless the open source model evolves".
That is the interesting part indeed. Perhaps there is a place for another type of license in between gpl/mit and full proprietary. I wonder what that would look like. Perhaps it’s time. But the grey area is just so vast.
> there would be “no more open source companies in Silicon Valley” unless the community rethinks how it protects innovation
This is a sentiment I've heard from VC friends of mine for the past year now after their experience seeing the inability of Confluent, Sysdig, and even Hashicorp fail to successfully monetize their core offerings by undervaluing them.
I would challenge that. Their tech gained a stronghold because it had a liberal OSS license and thus a community formed around it.
Their technology itself isn’t critical, it was just popular to such a degree that it was almost standard in a lot of settings.
Now they’ve upset that community we see they’re not as critical as they think they are - OpenTofu exists and people are shunning Vault and the rest of their offerings.
If I was starting a software business today I simply wouldn’t open source on day one. I might lose some of the crowd that only uses OSS but I’d just have to focus on others for a while.
Many things out there could be medium or big sized companies if Big Tech did not kill their business model by offering a good enough solution for free in order to drive the customer to other products/ services.
> Says Linux Foundation's OpenTofu adoption "tragic" Yeah, for them, not for the community that they tried to fuck over.
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.
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…
Well said.