431–440 of 760 posts
I've had this conversation a few times with people today so I may as well have it publicly here now too. I feel especially privileged to have lead the Heroku Add-ons/Ecosystem team at a pretty pivotal time in devtools history. There was a sudden emergence of people/companies inventing entirely new things (e.g., databases, logging systems, telemetry, etc.) and so much of it was OSS. The overwhelming majority of these…
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> Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for That sounds like what the GP comment is saying. If someone said "turns out open source doesn't work for our business model" it's hard to argue with. If instead they talk about "evolving open source models" and whatnot, it feels like they want the best of both worlds. It's been happening a lot recently that companies pretend they are "open sourci…
I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means out of survival. Source available is the new open source, and what young technologists will grow up grinding on. You’ll have folks complain about it during the transition (as happens with any Overton window sort of event), but they’ll move on eventually and a new crop of tech industry will grow up with this as the new normal. Change is inevitable, broadly sp…
We've had "source available" for a long time, which means something else.
I don't disagree that people may still use SA software more as time goes by, but I would argue that when possible people will prefer open source controlled by entities that keep it such.
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> I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means Only if we let it, and stop shouting about it and finding alternatives every time a company does this. This isn't a new thing; companies have been trying to play "almost open source" games for decades, and they'll continue playing those games as long as it either works or doesn't have sufficiently large penalties for trying. (Much as companies will continu…
> 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?
Oracle decided to make Hudson commercial, it was forked and Jenkins is still around but Hudson is dead.
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Why, quite clearly: > Organizations providing competitive offerings to HashiCorp will no longer be permitted to use the community edition products free of charge under our BSL license. Commercial licensing terms are available and can enable use cases beyond the BSL limitations. Looks to me very similar to (A)GPL + commercial dual licensing, for instance.
Quite clearly? That is extremely vague and leaves up to Hashicorp’s interpretation and could change as Hashicorp’s portfolio expands.
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I'll definitely check it out. That said, I'm starting to feel a lot more skeptical of the ability for even founders to manage stuff like this. I would say the same of my own OSS as a "founder," but if my company controls it in some way then I'm not sure there's a reasonable way for me to ensure that continues in perpetuity. At least not via a split model like a lot of these recent news stories have revolved around. F…
I think the easiest way to manage it is essentially to do nothing. Accept open source contributions without a contributor license agreement and their copyright locks in future maintainers, yourself included. Extricating those contributions eventually becomes impossible without a cleanroom rewrite that is usually economically impractical and way too risky to a business with revenue.
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But your contributions stopped being "your" contributions the moment you signed off on them being merged into the vault codebase. Why would they owe you anything when you already indicated you were cool with the fact that you didn't want anything in return by contributing? This change protects the project from getting outright shut down because huge companies use it to extract value without some of that value going i…
I guess you can chalk that up to naivety on my part. I've always assumed there is a social contract on top of the CLA I probably signed, that the software I wrote would continue to be available and maintained via contributions from both the company and community. And since they very obviously benefit from a plethora of OSS themselves, including the language they've used to build their products and the platforms they…
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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.
Absurd. Providing a managed instance of open source software that’s complicated to manage is fine. It’s not AWS’s fault that Elastic did a bad job of selling into AWS accounts. They should have worked on their value prop.
I honestly can't fathom this worldview or how so many people here seem to be so sure it is the one that makes sense.
If you win this battle for mindshare, people will just stop making open source services like these. Every service will just be fully closed source SaaS. Amazon can't just re-sell that no matter what, and people just crap on you if you make it open source (edit: re-reading this, should have said "source available" here), so why would anyone bother?
Increasingly people who make open source software services are damned if they do and damned if they don't, and if that is how it's gonna be, people are going to just stop bothering with it.
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> They should have worked on their value prop. AWS customers like that there's one bill and one account. Who wants to deal with multiple vendors if they don't have to? It isn't a level playing field when Amazon offers a service. Amazon could have chosen a cooperative, long-term, strategy and shared some revenue with the authors for some quid-pro-quo, and the world and Amazon, would be better for it. Instead, Amazon c…
The reason historically it hasn’t been a level playing field is because Amazon have: - The ability to invent new infrastructure to suit a need. For example, multi legged ENIs that provide the EKS control plane are simply not available to others, - The ability to integrate with IAM natively, - The ability to build common network architectures without outrageous costs (traffic over peering links being a good example si…
That's pretty disappointing. I personally haven't used much beyond vault (I've used but not enjoyed or built anything on terraform), but this is pretty diametrically opposed to what I appreciated most about hashicorp products. Heck, I've even contributed a chunk of the code I use the most from vault (Cert management) and now I'm going to have to reevaluate whether I can attempt to use that service for customers going…
The huge difference is where the copyright of the code lays. OSS projects that require contributors to assign their copyright away, should not be trusted, and should not receive goodwill contributions to begin with. Otherwise, what today is Apache 2.0, tomorrow can become Commercial, while asking nobody for permission, because the maintainers have ownership of 100% of the code. Not that OSS projects backed by commerc…
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…
> This is 100% in the spirit of open source That is the spirit of Free Software (ie restricting users as little as possible) Open Source is much smaller in scope.
So restricting competitors is as much against the OS spirit as it is against the FS spirit.