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> 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

> 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

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.