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HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

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Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#101

Post by rbanffy »

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?

GPL would prevent others from modifying their work and turning it into a competing product. AGPL would have prevented others from modifying their work and turning it into a competing service.

BSD and other "liberal" licenses are great if you want to make adoption easy, but makes you vulnerable to Amazonification.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#102

Post by mosh6 »

Ex- HashiCorp customer here. HashiCorp has some great products. but as a company they were bad over the years, and even worse over time. Bad culture, some stupid employees, bad terms, increasing pricing and not being transparent. I don't think their CEO understands the market. or understand what customers need. I think the company is dying , or will be acquired next year.

As for us - we just moved to their OSS Terraform + Vault and it's even better than how it was when we had their Enterprise. Have I said that company has no future?

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#103

Post by cratermoon »

alephnerd wrote: post #92
cratermoon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That "rug pull" you and other HN commentators talk about has happened after there is a need for cost cutting (eg. IBM wanting RoI after an expensive M&A deal, late stage Confluent investors wanting stronger returns, pissed off activist investors in MongoDB and Hashicorp annoyed that the share value has dropped despite core revenue fundamentals being consistent). A lot of these OSS-core companies are extremely late st…

> a need for cost cutting

But then you go on to mention investor returns

> the stage where investors wish to get an RoI out of them.

Exactly describing the rug pull or, as Cory Doctorow deemed it, the final stage of enshittification. Clawing back all the value provided to customers to hand to the investors. See for example Google's two $70 billion buybacks at the same time they were joining the rest of Big Tech in Big Layoffs.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#104

Post by darkarmani »

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?

Hashicorp wouldn't have a successful product if they hadn't open sourced their code.

Now that they are entrenched, they want to change rules (and whine about it) because it makes them more money.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#105

Post by vetrom »

zeroCalories wrote: post #57
madeofpalk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also benefited from a large ecosystem of third party contributors, whom were not (at least, visibly?) considered as stakeholders when Hashicorp implemented this license change.

I'm pretty sure no-one contributing to a product's ecosystem likes it when the previous agreements related to IP underpinning the ecosystem is rugpulled out from under them.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#106

Post by rapnie »

kervantas wrote: post #7

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

I see it more as both sides taking calculated risk. Developers contributing to a corporate-led OSS project with particular licensing should know that they can be rug-pulled at any time. They benefit during the project and afterwards from a good fork that otherwise wouldn't exist (a healthy fork taking shape or not is additional risk). OpenTofu is a great win for the community.

For the company the risk is that the stronger community they build, the higher the chances of a serious backlash when they rug pull. Weigh the reputation damage, and upon emergence of a good fork having a serious competitor, to the benefits of community contributions.

Don't want to be rug pulled? Choose community-led projects with good governance and copyleft licensing to contribute to.

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#107

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: HashiCorp CEO Predicts OSS-Free Silicon Valley

#110

Post by arcticfox5 »

api wrote: post #5

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…

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