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HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

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Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#71

Post by paxys »

echelon wrote: post #21
kervantas wrote: post #7

> Says Linux Foundation's OpenTofu adoption "tragic" Yeah, for them, not for the community that they tried to fuck over.

Where's this same vitriol directed at Amazon, Google, et al.? They've built huge cloud platforms on the backs of open source. These are highly profitable machines that siphon up so much free labor and give very little back. Instead we attack HashiCorp, whose entire product is going to fall into disuse over a fork of the very thing they built. Why is that? I'm angry at AWS - it's literally just open source software ru…

If Meta announced that every company hosting a React website needed to pay them a licensing fee starting next month or shut it down, they would (rightfully) get vitriol for it. That is what this is equivalent to, not big companies using open source projects. HashiCorp is free to use whatever open source they want, including in proprietary products (that's the entire point of open source). It's the rug pull and blindsiding of the community that is the problem.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#72

Post by jemmyw »

I sure wonder what they expected to happen when they changed the license. They were aiming to destroy the businesses of competing services that had grown up around their open source project. Were they imagining that the people running those companies would just sadly close up shop and the customers would eagerly jump to HashiCorp's bosom?

The reality was that those companies exist because there's a gap in their offerings and plenty of demand for alternatives. Once that dynamic exists it's going to try to protect itself too.

My point is this was all so far predictable. I would love to know what they thought would happen instead.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#73

Post by api »

sneak wrote: post #44
josephcsible wrote: post #40

Earlier 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.

... and this is the problem.

Any license that doesn't help feed the non-free SaaS ecosystem is a non-free license.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#75

Post by wmf »

josephcsible wrote: post #59
sneak wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AGPL: If you want to host it you have to pay.

SSPL: If you want to host it you have to pay.

BUSL: If you want to host it you have to pay.

Yet one is OSI-approved and the others aren't.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#76

Post by trevex »

echelon wrote: post #62
erik_seaberg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HashiCorp is seeking a monopoly on hosting Terraform, which is bad for me as a user if I think another vendor might do a better job (or even just to keep prices in line with costs). It would have been better if they had been paid for writing Terraform and now hosting services could compete on their own merits.

> HashiCorp is seeking a monopoly on hosting Terraform HashiCorp is trying to see an upside to the thing they've put a lot of effort into building. They're seeing lots of other companies -- including Amazon -- use it to enhance their own bottom lines off of HashiCorp's hard work. These companies pose an existential threat to HashiCorp, and the HashiCorp stakeholders are getting nothing in return. Free repackaging low…

While this is certainly true, there is also another part of the puzzle.

There are plenty contributors in the ecosystem building providers, submitting PRs under the assumption that the ecosystem will benefit and not solely Hashicorp.

As it stands most providers are not maintained by Hashicorp, e.g. AWS, Azure, Google, Hetzner, GitLab, ...

While the license change does not directly affect the providers it limits the ecosystems use of those providers.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#77

Post by growse »

josephcsible wrote: post #38
markphip wrote: post #28

There is nothing inherently wrong with HashiCorp's license. What IS wrong is building a product and community and accepting contributions based on an OSS license and THEN changing that license when it no longer suits them. The reality is that whether it was HashiCorp, Elastic, Mongo or any of the others that have gone down this path, if they had just started out with their BSL-type license they likely never would hav…

> There is nothing inherently wrong with HashiCorp's license. Proprietary software licenses are inherently wrong, though.

This is contested.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#78

Post by zenlot »

Twitter, Slack, Discord, Youtube, Gmail, Google search, JetBrains software and all the other good daily drivers aren't open source. Games we play usually aren't opensource either. PS5 and Xbox aren't opensource, as well as Nintendo. As long as those tools provides you with some "free" version (doesn't matter if you're product) then it's perfectly fine. And it seems that with all the non opensource versions you get a better product overall. And I'd rather play the better game, use the better search and write in better editor, than go for opensource version, which source I would probably never read.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#79

Post by pritambaral »

wmf wrote: post #75
josephcsible wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AGPL: If you want to host it you have to pay. SSPL: If you want to host it you have to pay. BUSL: If you want to host it you have to pay. Yet one is OSI-approved and the others aren't.

More like:

AGPL: If you want to host it, go ahead. If you want to host a modified version of it, provide source.

SSPL: If you want to host it, release your entire stack under the SSPL first. Good luck with that, lol.

BUSL: If you want to host it, you better not be making any money from it.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#80

Post by M2Ys4U »

habitue wrote: post #65

I think what a lot of people are missing is to do the backwards induction from where companies predict how things will go back to the present where they develop open source software and release it. Previously, the belief was that you'd open source the software and then sell support since you knew the code the best (even though it's open source, the knowledge in the brains of the developers working on the code was not…

>That's the RedHat model and... well it's pretty dead. No startups today are predicting that will be the profitability scenario for their company since the paragon of the model, RedHat, had to sell themselves to IBM.

RedHat had $3 billion in gross revenue ($434 million net) in 2018 before the IBM acquisition and that was UP 15% from the previous year.

They didn't have to sell themselves. They chose to.

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