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They should have been. Them being irresponsible early on is negative for the community. Cynically, I believe they intentionally were stupid knowing that their

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.
- prepend 3y ago
  > A source-available license like BUSL probably would have been a better fit for HashiCorp from the start My problem with source-available licenses is that it makes the software miss out on the network effects of contributions. I’m not going to contribute to source-available licensed software just like I won’t contribute to Windows (source code is available to see but they don’t even accept contribs). I like contributing my time to communities and to building things together. I make pretty minimal contributions because I’m paid to write software for an organization and don’t have time to contribute meaningfully. Even if hashi worked out some way to compensate me for my contrib, I don’t think I would bother because the amount would be negligible. So if the idea is to have high quality software due to network effects, source available doesn’t seem like a good fit for this. It also seems moot to me because decompilers have been able to get me the source of things that aren’t open source. Being able to view the source code isn’t as important to me as being able to work on things as a community. Having a single corporation reap all the benefits of a community is not something I want to work on.
  - pxc 3y ago
    Totally agreed. But we've also gotten clear signals from HashiCorp that they aren't very interested in community contributions for a long time now, like removing commit access from community maintainers years ago and no longer allocating company time for reviewing community contributions. They liked the idea that customers could try before they buy, and that customers could inspect the source code for debugging or other purposes, but they clearly didn't buy into the whole catb thing. From where you and I sit, it's a missed opportunity. Perhaps Hashi had good reasons to believe that they had to be the ones to drive Terraform forward themselves, and that community contributions would at best play a negligible role, whether that's because core Terraform code is hard to work on, because the contributions they saw tended to be minor, or because they wanted all the core contributions to be their own for the sake of retaining control. But whatever their reasons, they weren't on the same page as you and me about this.

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.

prepend 3y ago
> A source-available license like BUSL probably would have been a better fit for HashiCorp from the start My problem with source-available licenses is that it makes the software miss out on the network effects of contributions. I’m not going to contribute to source-available licensed software just like I won’t contribute to Windows (source code is available to see but they don’t even accept contribs). I like contributing my time to communities and to building things together. I make pretty minimal contributions because I’m paid to write software for an organization and don’t have time to contribute meaningfully. Even if hashi worked out some way to compensate me for my contrib, I don’t think I would bother because the amount would be negligible. So if the idea is to have high quality software due to network effects, source available doesn’t seem like a good fit for this. It also seems moot to me because decompilers have been able to get me the source of things that aren’t open source. Being able to view the source code isn’t as important to me as being able to work on things as a community. Having a single corporation reap all the benefits of a community is not something I want to work on.
- pxc 3y ago
  Totally agreed. But we've also gotten clear signals from HashiCorp that they aren't very interested in community contributions for a long time now, like removing commit access from community maintainers years ago and no longer allocating company time for reviewing community contributions. They liked the idea that customers could try before they buy, and that customers could inspect the source code for debugging or other purposes, but they clearly didn't buy into the whole catb thing. From where you and I sit, it's a missed opportunity. Perhaps Hashi had good reasons to believe that they had to be the ones to drive Terraform forward themselves, and that community contributions would at best play a negligible role, whether that's because core Terraform code is hard to work on, because the contributions they saw tended to be minor, or because they wanted all the core contributions to be their own for the sake of retaining control. But whatever their reasons, they weren't on the same page as you and me about this.