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Technical people knows that HashiCorp tools are good but there are alternatives and any tool can be replaced with moderated effort.
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> 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.
A lot of these OSS-core companies are extremely late stage or already public, so they are at the stage where investors wish to get an RoI out of them.
> seeing that wild ride of the SV VCs is coming to an end
Most of these OSS-core companies switching to restrictive licensing are towards the later stage/age of a company - around 10-15 years old. Their late stage investors (if their a startup) and largest shareholders (if public) tend to be Growth Funds and Mutual Funds - both financial instruments that have different goals and return criterias compared to Venture Capital.
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> 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.
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?
env0 CEO here. From the article: He added that it offered to carry on working with the four main companies affected by the switch, saying “You just have to bear some of the r&d costs. And they were like, ‘No, no, we're gonna do something else’. Which is fine.” I want to clarify that nobody ever approached us (env0) from Hashicorp.
IaaC Do they mean "Infrastructure as as Code"?
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... 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.
That's because making software usable is extremely difficult and expensive. If software must be free but services are paid, all the funding goes to make services usable and not software. This results in an ecosystem where only highly technical people can own their own compute.
Is that what we want?
You have to think in a whole-systems way not in terms of single isolated issues. We're making free bricks to build a prison and reasoning that this is fine because bricks should be free and people should be free to build prisons with them.
It might come down to the question of what open source is about. If it's about creating a software ecosystem for nerds to have freedom, I'd argue that it's been successful in that endeavor. If there is any goal of freedom for the rest of humanity, it has been a failure.
Are we a guild that cares only for ourselves and our profession?
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> 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…
Their virtualization tools are niche, being squeezed by whatever the cloud provider offers for "free" on one side, and KVM (and platform-native hypervisors) on the other. You rarely hear them mentioned.
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 d…
They are probably safe from XYZ startup. The real threat comes from XYZ enterprise. Like what Amazon did to Elastic.
... if you want the whole pie. The open source business model works if the service you provide is to sell consulting, implementation, certification... If you want the whole SaaS pie then why are you going open source in the first place? To have the community develop the ecosystem for free for a decade making an SaaS business viable before you pull the rug?
The middle ground gets lost here. What if you like the idea of collaboration, letting list people use your work for free, and making some money on proserv with the people who need it? Well, too fucking bad, because Megacorps (Amazon) or others can create an alternative to your product at a loss just to curbstomp you out of existence. I don't blame a company for trying to earn a living for them and their family while…
If you invest in developing the tool, you'll still be the best option for supporting the tool.
> Megacorps (Amazon) or others can create an alternative to your product at a loss
This is why things like AGPL exist.
They have a business model that they cannot sustain - instead of changing the license (and pulling the rug under their community's feet), they should look into changing the business model.