This one is interesting to me. I've been a big fan of Hashicorp ever since the only thing they had was Vagrant over a decade ago. The core of my usage has remai

This one is interesting to me. I've been a big fan of Hashicorp ever since the only thing they had was Vagrant over a decade ago. The core of my usage has remained all of the CLI tooling, i.e. Packer, Terraform. It's more or less impossible to create any kind of competitors by trying to steal from these as they're free to begin with, plus they provide virtually no value on their own and rely on a universe of a providers and plugins to actually do anything, some of which are created by Hashicorp, but many of which are not. One of the more extensive foolaround tools I ever made was vaguely inspired by Packer, years ago when there wasn't a plugin to support Hyper-V and I wanted automate creating machine images for my Windows laptop to run various flavors of Linux so I could work on Linux from Scratch over and over without having to copy/paste everything at the command line. It was only "architecturally" inspired, though. I didn't even look at their source code and wrote everything from scratch entirely in Powershell since it was only for personal use and only intended to run on Windows. I guess the signal here is they care more about and have pivoted business-wise to their own hosted offerings. I admit I'm not entirely sure what those are. I don't anyone that uses Terraform Cloud, but I guess someone must. So I guess Consul, Nomad, and Vault, but again, does anyone use the hosted versions of these? The big sell to me has always been all of their products can be self-hosted. Professionally, my use has mostly been with defense and intelligence customers offering behind an air gap who couldn't use the cloud offerings if they wanted to. By far the biggest value add has always seemed to be Vault. Consul and Nomad have very clear competitors that still command more mindspace, but Vault seems to reign supreme if you want to self-host a secrets manager. On this front, though, as great of a product as it is, how much of that is even due to Hashicorp itself? The security is provided by implementations of open encryption algorithms, Shamir secret sharing, fips modules in the OS, and HSM support, but they don't make the HSMs. HA is provided by the Raft implementation of the Paxos family of consensus voting, but again, they didn't invent that. The fact this product exists at all is because they stood on the shoulders of giants who did all the heavy lifting in creating these secure and robust algorithms in the first place, and then shared them and allowed others to build commercial offerings on top of them. Your entire company exists because of other people's open source efforts, and then you close off and say no one else can build on top of your work, when if the OGs had done that, your product would never have been a viable business.