421–430 of 760 posts
I’m a full time engineer, working on OSS for more than a decade. As much as I love open-souce, I get the point that there are a bunch of freeloaders using stuff and not contributing back.
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> they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community. e.g. AWS -> Elasticsearch.
Elasticsearch is based off lucene so they are making money off another open source project.
Lucene is the core piece but %-wise the minority of the ES product.
There's no Lucene "competitor" to Elasticsearch.
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Pulumi Founder/CEO here. The blog post is disingenuous. We tried many times to contribute upstream fixes to Terraform providers, but HashiCorp would never accept them. So we've had to maintain forks. They lost their OSS DNA a long time ago, and this move just puts the final nail in the coffin. Thankfully over time, they already pushed responsibility for most Terraform providers back onto their partners, so I'm hopefu…
Opposite anecdote, I know a few SAs at AWS who contribute to Terraform.
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If you want people/companies to contribute back, why volunteer your code under a license that doesn't require that?
"Why did I leave Halloween candy on my porch if I wasn't okay with one jerk kid taking all of it for himself?" Because projects believ(ed) that the good will of their users would be enough to sustain their projects and businesses. Now that certain projects see that good will isn't working, they're switching to the legal system.
I don't know if I've ever seen so many useful Open Source software products go proprietary at once; Vault, Consul, Terraform are all useful parts of many people's stacks, that they chose specifically because of their licence. Hopefully they all get forked (or existing forks take off), and it is just a matter of the community converging on the winner that we all use in the future.
Not possible, at least for vault and terraform The way the architecture works, any fork would have an impossible task to take off and maintain compatibility
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> The best possible response to a company doing this is that someone forks the code, starts or expands a competitor, and the original company's revenue drops massively as a deterrent. Example of the last time this worked?
I don't know what the impact was on their revenue, but pretty much anything Oracle has ever touched.
https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2023/...
> As a result, we believe commercial open source models need to evolve for the ecosystem to continue providing open, freely available software. To imply that a non-open-source license like the BUSL is part of such an evolution of "open source" models (commercial or otherwise) betrays either severe confusion or a deliberate attempt to mislead. Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningful…
Fly.io was built off of nomad for a while. That wouldn’t be allowed in this new world.
It is important to understand that there are two kinds of open-source software: - Software made by startups that are precious to HN. In this case, building a business on top of them is "freeloading" and it's deeply immoral. Examples: Elastic, HashiCorp, Mongo - "Public good software", there's nothing wrong with profiting from it, in fact, it's encouraged. Examples: Linux, Postgres, Nginx, Apache
Or another way to look at it: software that volunteers can't/won't develop and thus will only exist if a company can sustain itself vs. software that volunteers can and will develop.
The vast, vast, vast majority of open source software was created by engineers at for-profit companies where, through their line of work, they faced a problem, and after solving it had the insight "hey, other companies may have this problem". On the flip side, the vast majority of maintainers are engineers at for-profit companies who face new problems related to the software every day, and share their solutions back so we can all benefit from everyone else's work.
Its not the old fable of the greybeard in his basement tirelessly maintaining some internet-critical piece of software (though, those definitely exist). Its: "Hey, your business uses Kubernetes and derives millions in revenue either directly or indirectly from it? Mind helping keep it going?"
This is critical to understand because: Vault and Terraform could absolutely have been sustained and grown by the community of its users. There is zero doubt in my mind of this. List the top 50 websites by traffic volume, and every single one of those companies uses both of these products, extensively; many of the companies have engineers devoting effort toward projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Javascript, or Postgres. Vault and Terraform aren't even close to a situation of "but who maintains it"; Hashicorp just refused to let anyone have power in the project that wasn't on their payroll. Far more open source projects die due to this than a lack of interest in maintenance.
The root problem isn't profit motive; its venture capital. To some degree, it is also: projects created to solve the problems of their users before their creators actually have the same problem.
It is important to understand that there are two kinds of open-source software: - Software made by startups that are precious to HN. In this case, building a business on top of them is "freeloading" and it's deeply immoral. Examples: Elastic, HashiCorp, Mongo - "Public good software", there's nothing wrong with profiting from it, in fact, it's encouraged. Examples: Linux, Postgres, Nginx, Apache
I don't think nginx is a good example though. They have a lot of features they refuse to get contributed as they want them paywalled in nginx-plus Like service discovery and better load balancing algorithms.
I honestly think that’s a better relationship, kong basically advertises nginx (seems that nginx also talks about kong openly)… and yet both have enterprise services. They may not be in direct competition but they do have overlap. That’s what good competition looks like.
Edit: I do not know if kong pays nginx.
All that I get from this is that HashiCorp is no longer an open source company. > However, there are other vendors who take advantage of pure OSS models, and the community work on OSS projects, for their own commercial goals, without providing material contributions back. We don’t believe this is in the spirit of open source. This is 100% in the spirit of open source. If this is a problem for them, why not adopt an o…
>like the AGPL? As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.