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I prefer reasonable business decisions that support open source software over companies baiting and switching. If Hashicorp didn’t have a business plan that ma

I prefer reasonable business decisions that support open source software over companies baiting and switching. If Hashicorp didn’t have a business plan that made money off terraform being OSS then the time for that was years ago. If you release as OSS then your competitors will use it to. This is predictable and all plans should account for it. This competition didn’t hurt Hashicorps chances of profitability, they were factored in from the beginning.

louzell 3y ago
I mean, businesses change? The founders didn't have a crystal ball to see how every decision would play out. Reading through these comments, I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is". If Hashicorp had started with this new license in the first place, do we really think they wouldn't have had the business success that they've had? We'll never know, but my guess is that a license that says "competitors can't copy us" would seem totally reasonable to folks contributing, and irrelevant to customers that have a problem to solve. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I want to understand this obviously passionate response. (Since I've commented a couple times on this let me also say I'm not a hashicorp employee nor know anyone there)
- dablya 3y ago
  I don't know that it's at all clear how successful Terraform would be if it started with a more restrictive license. I mean there is a reason why a lot of projects start out with a different license and only change to BSL once a certain level of popularity is achieved, right?
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    As a possible contributor, and with all things being equal (which, really, never happens), I'd prefer a GPL-based product to have my time over a BSD/MIT license, because I really want my work to remain free. A BSL-based product would have to be very important to me to make it worth for me to dedicate time to it. In reality, the usefulness of the product and friendliness towards developers is much more important.
- prepend 3y ago
  Do you think crack dealers change their mind and suddenly discover they can’t make money off free crack? Or they give it away knowing that’s how you develop a customer base.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Pretty sure crack dealers don't set things up so their work can be forked into a foundation.
    - cto_of_antifa 3y ago
      [dead]
    - prepend 3y ago
      Bait and switch isn’t about the literal means of production. It’s about corporation and organizational dishonesty. It’s lame that hashicorp (and others) are fair weather open sources who start as open source to gain critical mass and then jettison their purported ideals when it benefits them. Dishonest because they trick contributors into working toward something that they may not, I think probably wouldn’t have, chosen to work on had hashicorp been honest since the beginning.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        I don't know what "literal means of production" is referring to here. Crack dealers don't generally control anything one might refer to as a "means of production"; they are more like resellers. Marxist terminology is a bit too much of a Duplo-brick description of reality to apply usefully here, or indeed in most places. All the work done in this case can be forked into a different product, as is being done here. The reason crack dealers do what they do is they control the supply, not a "means of production". Hashicorp explicitly licenced away their control of the supply ten years ago.
- hodgesrm 3y ago
  > I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is". That's not just pop psychology. That's straight from "The Prince" by Machiavelli. “Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred little by little, that so they may be more fully relished.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6858171-injuries-therefore-should-be-inflicted-all-at-once-that-their https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6858171-injuries-therefore-...
  - louzell 3y ago
    Nice find!
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    "Make sure your enemies read pop psychology"
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
pxc 3y ago
> This competition didn’t hurt Hashicorps chances of profitability, they were factored in from the beginning. They weren't, actually. From a Hashicorp FAQ article (which is a transcript of a video interview which has since been delisted from YouTube) titled 'Why is HashiCorp committed to open source?': > Mitchell: [I]t's always sort of been a default for me. [...] When we were starting the first projects, we both didn't intend to ever start a company around them. There was no monetization goal at all, and so I think open source was an obvious default then. https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/why-is-hashicorp-committed-to-open-source https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/why-is-hashicorp-committ...
- prepend 3y ago
  They should have been. Them being irresponsible early on is negative for the community. Cynically, I believe they intentionally were stupid knowing that their tool would only become widely used if open source (who wants infrastructure as code locked into some proprietary thing).
  - pxc 3y ago
    One of the things that comes through for me in that FAQ, Mitchell's story about learning to code by reading and playing with open-source projects, and Armon's assertion that this license change is continuous with the company's original 'open-source ethos' is that this has always really been more about 'source availability' for them— I think they're credible, in way. I still think of open-source in a traditional, historically informed way: 'open-source' is about software freedom at bottom, even though its name and common arguments in its favor are more practical and self-interested. I get the impression that Mitchell Hashimoto never saw it that way, and certainly didn't buy into the actual 'open-source ethos' in the sense of the values of the people who decided the term and founded OSI, etc. A source-available license like BUSL probably would have been a better fit for HashiCorp from the start, or as near the start as possible. But I don't know that 'source-available' as a label could have driven adoption the same way in the early days, and it seems plausible to me that the founders might've realized that too.
    - 3y ago

louzell 3y ago

I mean, businesses change? The founders didn't have a crystal ball to see how every decision would play out. Reading through these comments, I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is". If Hashicorp had started with this new license in the first place, do we really think they wouldn't have had the business success that they've had? We'll never know, but my guess is that a license that says "competitors can't copy us" would seem totally reasonable to folks contributing, and irrelevant to customers that have a problem to solve. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I want to understand this obviously passionate response. (Since I've commented a couple times on this let me also say I'm not a hashicorp employee nor know anyone there)

dablya 3y ago
I don't know that it's at all clear how successful Terraform would be if it started with a more restrictive license. I mean there is a reason why a lot of projects start out with a different license and only change to BSL once a certain level of popularity is achieved, right?
- rbanffy 3y ago
  As a possible contributor, and with all things being equal (which, really, never happens), I'd prefer a GPL-based product to have my time over a BSD/MIT license, because I really want my work to remain free. A BSL-based product would have to be very important to me to make it worth for me to dedicate time to it. In reality, the usefulness of the product and friendliness towards developers is much more important.
prepend 3y ago
Do you think crack dealers change their mind and suddenly discover they can’t make money off free crack? Or they give it away knowing that’s how you develop a customer base.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Pretty sure crack dealers don't set things up so their work can be forked into a foundation.
  - cto_of_antifa 3y ago
    [dead]
  - prepend 3y ago
    Bait and switch isn’t about the literal means of production. It’s about corporation and organizational dishonesty. It’s lame that hashicorp (and others) are fair weather open sources who start as open source to gain critical mass and then jettison their purported ideals when it benefits them. Dishonest because they trick contributors into working toward something that they may not, I think probably wouldn’t have, chosen to work on had hashicorp been honest since the beginning.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I don't know what "literal means of production" is referring to here. Crack dealers don't generally control anything one might refer to as a "means of production"; they are more like resellers. Marxist terminology is a bit too much of a Duplo-brick description of reality to apply usefully here, or indeed in most places. All the work done in this case can be forked into a different product, as is being done here. The reason crack dealers do what they do is they control the supply, not a "means of production". Hashicorp explicitly licenced away their control of the supply ten years ago.
hodgesrm 3y ago
> I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is". That's not just pop psychology. That's straight from "The Prince" by Machiavelli. “Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred little by little, that so they may be more fully relished.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6858171-injuries-therefore-should-be-inflicted-all-at-once-that-their https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6858171-injuries-therefore-...
- louzell 3y ago
  Nice find!
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  "Make sure your enemies read pop psychology"
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

pxc 3y ago

> This competition didn’t hurt Hashicorps chances of profitability, they were factored in from the beginning. They weren't, actually. From a Hashicorp FAQ article (which is a transcript of a video interview which has since been delisted from YouTube) titled 'Why is HashiCorp committed to open source?': > Mitchell: [I]t's always sort of been a default for me. [...] When we were starting the first projects, we both didn't intend to ever start a company around them. There was no monetization goal at all, and so I think open source was an obvious default then. https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/why-is-hashicorp-committed-to-open-source https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/why-is-hashicorp-committ...

prepend 3y ago
They should have been. Them being irresponsible early on is negative for the community. Cynically, I believe they intentionally were stupid knowing that their tool would only become widely used if open source (who wants infrastructure as code locked into some proprietary thing).
- pxc 3y ago
  One of the things that comes through for me in that FAQ, Mitchell's story about learning to code by reading and playing with open-source projects, and Armon's assertion that this license change is continuous with the company's original 'open-source ethos' is that this has always really been more about 'source availability' for them— I think they're credible, in way. I still think of open-source in a traditional, historically informed way: 'open-source' is about software freedom at bottom, even though its name and common arguments in its favor are more practical and self-interested. I get the impression that Mitchell Hashimoto never saw it that way, and certainly didn't buy into the actual 'open-source ethos' in the sense of the values of the people who decided the term and founded OSI, etc. A source-available license like BUSL probably would have been a better fit for HashiCorp from the start, or as near the start as possible. But I don't know that 'source-available' as a label could have driven adoption the same way in the early days, and it seems plausible to me that the founders might've realized that too.
  - 3y ago