Earlier quoted context omitted.
AGPL is very clearly a nonfree license, despite what the FSF says.
Please elaborate
HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
51–60 of 111 posts
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then you have XYZ startup appears, they takes your open-source code, repackages it and then sells enterprise features, professional services, and support. That is a feature of the model, not a bug. Exactly that happened to Git. Good. Happening at last in social media with Mastodon The point is to have a lot of smaller companies rather than one or two huge companies playing "lock in"
Reality is it is sort of mixed. For the OSS company actually building the product, you end up playing whack-a-mole in that anyone can spin up a competitor over the weekend. Look at what happened with Docker. They completely changed the landscape of running code locally and in production and was run out of town. Everyone and their dog took the code and re-packaged it and competed with Docker. Then compare that with VM…
The result is that the industry got better container run times because they had to compete with each other. Competition is a good thing - it gives us better products and services at lower prices.
And Docker still had the ecosystem, which they could have dug a deeper moat around. But they didn't, and they failed.
And not for nothing, VMWare has a significantly deeper technological moat than Docker. Containers are not hard to implement, virtualization is.
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#53This 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 d…
> Then you have XYZ startup appears, they takes your open-source code, repackages it and then sells enterprise features, professional services, and support. That is a feature of the model, not a bug. Exactly that happened to Git. Good. Happening at last in social media with Mastodon The point is to have a lot of smaller companies rather than one or two huge companies playing "lock in"
> Exactly that happened to Git. Good. Happening at last in social media with Mastodon.
No, it's a different thing. Git is not based on OSS code from BitKeeper and Mastodon isn't based on OSS code from FB/X/whatever.
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#54The problem is that HashiCorp also benefits a lot from the OSS community. But somehow I think they want to have their cake and eat it too. Which I don't think it is going to happen. It is not ok to take in contributions from everyone but only allow the usage for non-commercial purposes.
What is most likely to happen is to happen is that the terraform fork will become a new provider for cloud provisioning and the Hashi maintained one will become another provider, and the features and capabilities will diverge over time.
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#55This 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 d…
> Then you have XYZ startup appears, they takes your open-source code, repackages it and then sells enterprise features, professional services, and support. That is a feature of the model, not a bug. Exactly that happened to Git. Good. Happening at last in social media with Mastodon The point is to have a lot of smaller companies rather than one or two huge companies playing "lock in"
git or mastodon are not 'silicon valley'. Yes, it is a feature for others to build upon Mastodon.
It's a bit more problematic for, say, hasicorp. They don't like that.
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#56The problem is that HashiCorp also benefits a lot from the OSS community. But somehow I think they want to have their cake and eat it too. Which I don't think it is going to happen. It is not ok to take in contributions from everyone but only allow the usage for non-commercial purposes. What is most likely to happen is to happen is that the terraform fork will become a new provider for cloud provisioning and the Hash…
"Benefits a lot" is an understatement. Terraform would be nothing today without the countless hours spent by the community writing 5000+ providers for free (Hashicorp themselves have written 35 first party ones).
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then you have XYZ startup appears, they takes your open-source code, repackages it and then sells enterprise features, professional services, and support. That is a feature of the model, not a bug. Exactly that happened to Git. Good. Happening at last in social media with Mastodon The point is to have a lot of smaller companies rather than one or two huge companies playing "lock in"
git or mastodon are not 'silicon valley'. Yes, it is a feature for others to build upon Mastodon. It's a bit more problematic for, say, hasicorp. They don't like that.
They also benefit from making their software open source because it drives people to adot it.
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
They shouldn’t have gone all OSS if monetisation was their goal. It’s their own fault for thinking they could build a base off open source and then monetise it later.
They raised and went public in a different era. Public Investors have significantly higher expectations for rates of return, and plenty of OSS-core companies raised significantly larger late stage rounds. That said, try IPOing a tech company with $15-70M a year in revenue in the 2020s. Those numbers were the norms in the late 90s/early 2000s, which allowed companies like RedHat or Sun Microsystems to IPO, while still…
> in a different era.
It may seem like the early 2000s were a different era, but it's better to think of it as an earlier stage in this era. These companies built on OSS with varying degrees of giving back, so it seemed like they were all about the sharing economy. A decade later they'd built out their business (RIP Sun, though) and had solid positions in the market, not easily displaced. A decade later and the clawbacks begin. RedHat and HashCorp are just two examples of companies closing the doors, changing the terms of the deal, and harvesting the revenue they forwent in the early years. AKA the rug-pull
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Against this model open source software is offering zero resistance. Pushover licenses like MIT offer zero resistance to it, but that's just a reason to use better licenses like AGPLv3 instead, not to abandon open source entirely.
AGPL is very clearly a nonfree license, despite what the FSF says.
The OSI and DFSG are both fine with the AGPL too, so it's hard to take that claim seriously, especially as a bare assertion with zero evidence.
Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley
#60I 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…
I guess the lesson is to never open source your code? Or maybe to not trust "open source" and demand GPL?