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HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

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Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#81

Post by DicsyDel »

I think there is a lot of confusion (or misrepresentation) around Terraform and its license change:

1. There is Terraform project (that used to be open source and now BUSL), and there is Terraform Cloud SaaS (that was never open source)

2. Terraform project - includes CLI tool and HCL language. Terraform Cloud - is a hosted service that adds "enterprise" capabilities around Terraform.

3. If Terraform Cloud would also be an open source and people host it / repackage it, etc., and Hashi would change its license, that would be a valid comparison to Elastic and other license changes and would be reasonable. Changing a license on a CLI tool / language interpreter - is unprecedented. IANAL, but it's also unprecedented to make your own definitions of what embedded or hosted means - and if you read Hashi FAQ about license - it's just a bunch of nonsense (specifically in regards to what embedded and hosted means in the context of Terraform)

4. The only reason there are Terraform Cloud competitors (Like Scalr, Spacelift, Env0, Terrateam, and others) is because of how deficient Terraform Cloud is and Hashi's inability to execute properly. If Hashi would listen to their customers and customer success team and do what customers are asking - there is no way any of TFC's competitors would gain any ground. They are in full control of Terraform roadmap and prioritization - this gives a huge unfair advantage to them compared to any other competitor.

You "kill" competition and win the market by innovating and creating a superior product (talking about Terraform Cloud) and not by monopolizing market via license change and legal nonsense.

Disclaimer: I work for Scalr.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#82

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#83

Post by sneak »

api wrote: post #73
sneak wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. SaaS isn’t a loophole, it’s one of the legitimate things you can do with software freedom, in letter and in spirit.

Software is not services, and attempting to conflate them is, at the very least, logically flawed.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#84

Post by cratermoon »

alephnerd wrote: post #67
cratermoon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 clawb…

> A decade later they'd built out their business (RIP Sun, though) and had solid positions in the market, not easily displaced They were given the ability to build out their business. Companies like Hashicorp and other OSS core companies have revenue numbers roughly comparable to what would give you an IPO even 10 years ago. Mind you, Hashicorp is public, and their YoY revenue is around $520M a year. The issue was th…

None of which is especially relevant to the rug pull business, except in the sense that investors have seen the rug pull work and they are seeing that wild ride of the SV VCs is coming to an end, either through regulation or collapse, so they are doing it sooner.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#85

Post by mdaniel »

zenlot wrote: post #78

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…

> JetBrains software

I think this falls into the "we know what you meant," but that's not systemically true of JetBrains; quite a bit of their stuff is Apache 2: https://github.com/orgs/JetBrains/repositories

They have done some underhanded shit with some of the plugins but via acqui-hires, not rug-pull-ing their repos from an open license, so I wouldn't lump them into the same category as closed source software, nor the vile behavior of Hashicorp, Sentry, or Sourcegraph

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#86

Post by sausagefeet »

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…

HCP chose to open source Terraform. They didn't have to. They chose to market the OSS aspect of their products and use it as a selling point.

It may well be true that HCP is having trouble hitting their revenue goals because they open sourced Terraform but that doesn't mean the competition is the bad actor, for using an OSS product entirely in the spirit of OSS.

As it stands, my opinion is that your framing is incorrect. There is Terraform, which was OSS, and there is Terraform Cloud/Terraform Enterprise, which is not OSS. A lot of the development energy goes into TFC/TFE, and there is where the attractive, for pay, features are. Terraform has not been receiving a lot of development time. Only a few people from HCP, part time, working on it. I believe that the reality is that HCP is unable to keep up with their TFC/TFE product. They aren't innovating, and they are attempting to use the legal system to remove competition rather than compete on product. And now that OpenTofu exists and is part of LF, you don't even need HCP to succeed for your Terraform code to continue to live. Maybe one feels that is unfair, but it was their decision to OSS the product, and their decisions to change that. And capitalism isn't fair. Shrug emoji.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#87

Post by sausagefeet »

zeroCalories wrote: post #60
jakelazaroff wrote: post #9

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…

I guess the lesson is to never open source your code? Or maybe to not trust "open source" and demand GPL?

Or maybe make the paid portion of your product (TFC/TFE) good enough that people want to use it?

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#89

Post by [deleted] »

gymbeaux wrote: post #4

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.”

[deleted]

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#90

Post by gymbeaux »

alephnerd wrote: post #13
gymbeaux wrote: post #4

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.”

> RedHat 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).

It's a subsidiary of IBM, and if I had said "IBM" instead of "RedHat" nobody would understand what I was referring to.
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