11 ms·

HashiCorp did it backwards

125 points by galenmarchetti 3y ago

pacifika 3y ago
One is best not to make any decisions on how something will be in the future. This goes for pre ordering games, to buying software licenses, to opensource contributions. People contributed to the software as it was licensed then, and this software is still available under the open source license and can’t be taken away. Unfortunately that gives no guarantees about future versions or versions that never got made.
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  100% agreed with you...would be safest for everyone to take this stance going forward. I do think, and I could be wrong, that not everyone realized that the licensing worked this way. Or had their guard up when contributing. I think that's the issue...perhaps their fault, perhaps not, but I see the issue. I wonder if this will be an example moving forward that people keep in mind when contributing to any OSS project
  - elashri 3y ago
    Doesn't this mean that people will be more cautious and less likely to contribute on the long run? I mean that feels like it is against the spirit of open source movement. And yes I realize that this is idealistic position and the legal aspects gets the upper hand at the end. I just wish things didn't go this way.
    - galenmarchetti 3y ago
      I imagine so...I wonder if its possible to draft an open-source license that commits future versions of the project to be drafted under the same license. Maybe AGPL does this (?) I know AGPL applies to all "modifications", I wonder if that applies to modifications done by the maintainers themselves in the future. If so, maybe we'll see AGPL-like provisions becoming more popular in order to help folks feel more confident
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        Any copyleft license should so that so long as there's no CLA / transfer of copyright.
- wbl 3y ago
  Well it does if your contributions are made under the GPL and not transfered via a CLA.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  With terraform “keeping up with the latest” is way more important than say regular libraries and tools like ReactJS. A 5 year old react would mostly work fine (patch the odd bug if need be). Indeed look at Elm. But terraform is coupled to the moving target of cloud services.
  - networkchad 3y ago
    I think I get the point of your comment but can you expand? For instance, I’ve resorted to pinning a specific terraform version and plug-in version in a custom docker container. I can use the same TF scripts I wrote 4 years ago against the AWS API which has not changed since.
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Yes I think your case is OK. The question is more say your team decides to use a new feature, let's say it is GPT5 via Azure for example, with TF. Then you need to keep up to date. I am not heavily into TF so I don't know if that is possible with the pinned terraform and using later providers versions or how that works. But it seems more hassle than just using the latest of everything. Note I am talking about "keeping up" as a general need for IaC - but it might turn out that the TF fork is a better place to do that in the long term. Time will tell.
      - networkchad 3y ago
        Gotcha. I misunderstood the keeping up context. I chased TF version updates for a while before being annoyed at having to retool significant parts of my long existing scripts. I gave up and just stuck to a version for what I needed. My only concerns is I may neglect a security update, but this is for personal stuff and not for anything that others use/consume.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
If they started out openly proprietary, they wouldn't have got the same level of contributions from people outside the organisation, and wouldn't have reached the current popularity. Hashicorp did it the right way round. Open source, friendly, rug pull, profit, obsolete, forgotten.
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  haha...fair point! One thing that I've been curious to see, and not sure if anyone has done it yet, is a quantification of contribution to Terraform, comparing amount of work done from external contributors to the work done by Hashicorp-internal contributors. I know it's hard to make the comparison of what is "harder" work or "more" work in a software project from looking at commits alone, but would be interesting to see nonetheless.
  - tux1968 3y ago
    It's not just the work donated via the open source channel, it's also the associated credibility, enthusiastic coverage and referrals, and general good will, that accrues to such a project. None of which they would have enjoyed had they been a private project.
    - galenmarchetti 3y ago
      definitely...and they get to keep that credibility and coverage. at least, as long as this move didn't totally alienate the folks that got on terraform back then
      - zaphar 3y ago
        That credibility largely only applies to a certain group of people. The license change tanked that credibility with that group of people. Hashicorp did a classic misstep for open source based companies and as a may have lost the mindshare and marketshare for one of their most significant offerings. I'm actually not sure they'll survive this.
gobins 3y ago
This is probably going to get a lot flake but what did we expect when big tech started eating up open source solutions and competing with the companies who started the work . MongoDB and AWS is a good example. Hashicorp probably realised that they should preemptively change the licensing before bigger players started using the products to directly compete with them. I want Hashicorp to survive and be profitable. Fact is, for the majority of the users who use terraform, the change in licensing does not impact them.
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  True...it's just difficult to draft a license that says something along the lines of "If you're Big Tech, we have the right to go after you, if you're small startup, you're safe". I think there's a swath of Terraform users (likely minority) who find themselves in a legal gray area, or a legal black-and-white area, where they're directly at risk. Even if Hashicorp never intended to target small startups with this, the wording of the license unfortunately applies and is enough to make anyone nervous. I think MongoDB had a similar issue when they went source-available, they seemed to intend to only protect themselves from big tech but unfortunately a lot of smaller players got spooked. I think (?) it's fine now though
  - woah 3y ago
    yea, that makes all the difference. If it was almost all Hashicorp, the open source was a marketing gimmick and I don't blame them for not risking the entire business on it. If there was heavy involvement from external contributors, then removing open source is more of a rug pull.
  - solomatov 3y ago
    > True...it's just difficult to draft a license that says something along the lines of "If you're Big Tech, we have the right to go after you, if you're small startup, you're safe". Take a look at the license of LLAMA2 by FB. It has a clause just like this. I.e. limit by number of users.
    - 3y ago
firesteelrain 3y ago
I don’t really care what license they use. It gets the job done.
- ciroduran 3y ago
  It does the job until you have to get legal onboard, and then they will raise issues with the possibility of your startup becoming a competitor to Hashicorp
  - firesteelrain 3y ago
    I don’t work in a startup so I am ok (and no plans to)
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Hashicorp isn't Oracle. It's still always useful to think about license questions in terms of whether it'd be OK if it were Oracle instead. For example, consider: "I don't really care what license Oracle uses. It gets the job done." If you wouldn't say that, and oh how I hope you'd never say that!, then why say it about Hashicorp? So far they've been reasonably decent, license shenanigans aside. However, remember that they're just one acquisition away from that being untrue. The license always matters. Always.
  - firesteelrain 3y ago
    I work at a place that will pay for those types of licenses. That’s my point (but we don’t need to because their license doesn’t require anyone to pay for Enterprise or Cloud)
izalutski 3y ago
Yep, backwards they did (Disclosure: I'm from Digger and OpenTF so am biased) Hashi's biggest miscalculation is that they put Terraform (an open language / ecosystem) into the same bucket as Vault and Consul, which are hostable backend applications. BSL makes sense for Vault, just like it does for MongoDB. It is reasonable to prevent others from charging for hosting your code. But with Terraform, the backend part (TF Cloud) was never even open source. And it's not required for Terraform to work. Hashi shot themselves in the foot. Unlike with Vault or Consul, there is enormous vested interest in the community to keep Terraform truly open. Hashi trying to enforce everyone to use their non-oss backend with it will only result in Hashi losing the privileged (and well deserved) position among providers of commercial products in the Terraform ecosystem.
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  this is a great point. I've been following your work decently closely but this is the first time I thought about the "hostable" vs "non-hostable" differentiation. And thinking more deeply on it, of course it matters. There's a pretty big distinction and, naively, perhaps their attempt to protect TF Cloud with this doesn't even accomplish what they intended for it to accomplish. If the backend part is the thing...that was never even in contention, anyway. If this is the case, they only managed to hurt the community.
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  Architecturally, I think Terraform really ought to be hosted, because otherwise you have to trust everyone with a far-reaching admin cred on his desktop right next to Zoom and maybe BonziBuddy.
  - wingmanjd 3y ago
    A small counterpoint: My $DAYJOB's architecture is completely self-hosted (Proxmox, Nomad, etc). I would not prefer to have some external tool managing that infrastructure.
  - nightfly 3y ago
    Not if you use "bastion" type hosts, right?
wmf 3y ago
1. The elephant in the room here is VCs that pushed unsustainable pure open source or open core business models during ZIRP. You can't do it right from day one if your investors are pushing you the opposite direction. 2. People keep talking about community contributions but hasn't Hashicorp rejected all contributions for years?
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  would love to know a definitive/quantitative answer for #2, for sure. I do think it makes a difference when it comes to the "backstabbing" implications of the change
- theptip 3y ago
  On 2), you can define contributions narrowly as PRs in the repo, or broadly, as building providers, libraries, and documentation in the ecosystem. I think the latter perhaps makes more sense. Contributing providers, for example, is a massive contribution of labor that Hashi would have had to do themselves if the community didn’t.
  - galenmarchetti 3y ago
    didn't think about the documentation but that's especially true...it's a massive amount of copy, between all the tutorials, how-tos, educational material, and example code, all mindfully presented in a useful way
eatonphil 3y ago
Well they didn't do it backwards compared to at least some subset of peers. Cockroach: Apache -> BSL https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ Mongo: AGPLv3 -> SSPL https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/16/mongodb-switches-up-its-open-source-license/ Elasticsearch: Apache -> SSPL https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change I am sure there are more I'm forgetting. Edit: Removed MariaDB.
- kemitchell 3y ago
  Redis Labs, Confluent. Pretty sure I'm forgetting some of the smaller Commons Clause adopters.
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  this is a great point...further down the comments, an OpenTF maintainer made a great point that all of these services are "backend hostable" services. Terraform doesn't even have a backend service component...Terraform Cloud does, but not Terraform itself. I didn't contemplate this when writing the article but it seems like this might be a pretty big factor in the reaction to the change. At least to my memory, I don't remember as strong as a pushback from any of these companies changing their licenses
  - eatonphil 3y ago
    > I don't remember as strong as a pushback from any of these companies changing their licenses The Elasticsearch backlash was big for what it's worth, both privately inside companies and publicly (AWS forked it).
    - galenmarchetti 3y ago
      ah wow...I guess that begs the question, "will this just blow over". As far as I can tell Elasticsearch continues to do well and is more or less in the clear (could be wrong)
- StopHammoTime 3y ago
  MariaDB is still GPL. That article references some kind of scaling add on, not the core product.
Axsuul 3y ago
It's too soon to say. Terraform enjoys network effects due to HashiCorp's other tools working well with it out of the box.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Sure I can buy that - but how much? In the last 4 years I've spent probably 60-80% of my time writing terraform for various companies and maybe 5% of that involved a hashicorp product, and arguably, it would have been easier deploying it without terraform. Its main use case is to build cloud infrastructure, not interact with hashicorp products.
kodablah 3y ago
> if you want to start a business building developer tooling and you’re concerned about competitors using your work, you should probably start source-available (BSL) and then go for a license that is OSI-approved To put another way, if you want to start a business, make sure what you're selling you can do better than others. If your business is hosting open source software and you can't do that better than others, then don't make that your business. Maybe you should have been selling non-open-source instead (which they pivoted to now anyways).
pnathan 3y ago
My take is that if I want to run a business on open source, I license as AGPL3 with asterisk. Asterisk: if you want a permissive license, our salespeople are _right around the corner_, and they will take you to a steak dinner with our professional services lead, and you will have a fantastic white glove onboarding, and it will be absolutely lovely for everyone's bottom line.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nunez 3y ago
Going public is 10,000% the reason for this. From what I've seen, once a company goes public, all people care about is growth growth growth, which forces dumb enshittification like this. I'm wondering if selling to Microsoft or someone like that would've been better...
- personomas 3y ago
  No, they go public because they need more funding. They need more funding because they're not profitable. The reason 100% is because they didn't build a profitable business out of open source, so they have to change it to try to build something sustainable once opportunities for funding run out.
benterix 3y ago
That's a neat advertisement of Kurtosis and I have admit I clicked to see what it does (nothing useful for me - it's for the so-called "Web3").
yMMe2WYE_D 3y ago
Is there an easy way to filter out substack submissions from HN? I find the "newsletter popup in your face" approach more annoying than most ads.
octacat 3y ago
The way to kill open source is by first killing faith in it. MS: we like "open standards", here is our implementation specific stuff. Amazon: we don't care what would be with a project. If it is open source - we host it and get money. If it dies - people will use our closed source solutions. Google: XMPP is soo open, we like XMPP. Oh, now Web is soo open, we like Web (we even have a browser, wondering what would happen once everyone is using one browser). And now everyone loves open source to train AI. We would see less and less open source projects.
KptMarchewa 3y ago
My lesson is - use and contribute to Open Source software as long as it's not controlled by a single company, but donated to a OSS foundation like Apache or CNCF that has a vested interest in keeping things open.
pc_edwin 3y ago
Most of you guys are missing the forest for the trees. HashiCorp has been around for over a decade now and they've never turned a profit. ZIRP is over. If you guys keep sending these companies to the graveyard, there will no longer be an incentive to fund them. Then OSS will be reduced down to projects incubated by FAANG or stuff created by hobbyists. Imagine you are a capital allocator, why would you burn your (LPs) money for what amounts to free R&D for MSFT/GOOGL/AMZN. If you are going trash a company for taking the only viable path to maintain its existence, at the very least provide a feasible alternative.
- vb-8448 3y ago
  > Then OSS will be reduced down to projects incubated by FAANG or stuff created by hobbyists. Linux, Python and a lot of other OSS born from hobbyists or during high interests rates times. The problem is HashiCorp used VCs money for the wrong purpose.
  - pc_edwin 3y ago
    The thing is its not the 90s anymore, pretending otherwise is how you get LibreOffice or Inkscape. Tech has come a long way since the creation of linux or python. Even these projects have gotten to a level of sophistication that it would implode without big tech support. Why do you think you don't see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days? All the ones you see are either incubated inside FAANG or VC backed. To build, grow and maintain anything thats interesting these days will require a group of pretty talented people and these people have plenty of other prospects where they'll get paid pretty well.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Why do you think you don’t see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days? I do, in fact, see interesting OSS tech from hobbyists these days. The VC-backed and FAANG stuff is more visible because it has a bigger promotional budget, and it very often is inherentlty more broadly interesting. But it also tends to be quickly pivoted away from unless it meets quick wide commercial success.
mawadev 3y ago
This leaves the bitterest taste in my mouth: over night a lot of people went from being open source mainters to retroactively being janitors

One is best not to make any decisions on how something will be in the future. This goes for pre ordering games, to buying software licenses, to opensource contributions. People contributed to the software as it was licensed then, and this software is still available under the open source license and can’t be taken away. Unfortunately that gives no guarantees about future versions or versions that never got made.

galenmarchetti 3y ago
100% agreed with you...would be safest for everyone to take this stance going forward. I do think, and I could be wrong, that not everyone realized that the licensing worked this way. Or had their guard up when contributing. I think that's the issue...perhaps their fault, perhaps not, but I see the issue. I wonder if this will be an example moving forward that people keep in mind when contributing to any OSS project
- elashri 3y ago
  Doesn't this mean that people will be more cautious and less likely to contribute on the long run? I mean that feels like it is against the spirit of open source movement. And yes I realize that this is idealistic position and the legal aspects gets the upper hand at the end. I just wish things didn't go this way.
  - galenmarchetti 3y ago
    I imagine so...I wonder if its possible to draft an open-source license that commits future versions of the project to be drafted under the same license. Maybe AGPL does this (?) I know AGPL applies to all "modifications", I wonder if that applies to modifications done by the maintainers themselves in the future. If so, maybe we'll see AGPL-like provisions becoming more popular in order to help folks feel more confident
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Any copyleft license should so that so long as there's no CLA / transfer of copyright.
wbl 3y ago
Well it does if your contributions are made under the GPL and not transfered via a CLA.
quickthrower2 3y ago
With terraform “keeping up with the latest” is way more important than say regular libraries and tools like ReactJS. A 5 year old react would mostly work fine (patch the odd bug if need be). Indeed look at Elm. But terraform is coupled to the moving target of cloud services.
- networkchad 3y ago
  I think I get the point of your comment but can you expand? For instance, I’ve resorted to pinning a specific terraform version and plug-in version in a custom docker container. I can use the same TF scripts I wrote 4 years ago against the AWS API which has not changed since.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Yes I think your case is OK. The question is more say your team decides to use a new feature, let's say it is GPT5 via Azure for example, with TF. Then you need to keep up to date. I am not heavily into TF so I don't know if that is possible with the pinned terraform and using later providers versions or how that works. But it seems more hassle than just using the latest of everything. Note I am talking about "keeping up" as a general need for IaC - but it might turn out that the TF fork is a better place to do that in the long term. Time will tell.
    - networkchad 3y ago
      Gotcha. I misunderstood the keeping up context. I chased TF version updates for a while before being annoyed at having to retool significant parts of my long existing scripts. I gave up and just stuck to a version for what I needed. My only concerns is I may neglect a security update, but this is for personal stuff and not for anything that others use/consume.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

If they started out openly proprietary, they wouldn't have got the same level of contributions from people outside the organisation, and wouldn't have reached the current popularity. Hashicorp did it the right way round. Open source, friendly, rug pull, profit, obsolete, forgotten.

galenmarchetti 3y ago
haha...fair point! One thing that I've been curious to see, and not sure if anyone has done it yet, is a quantification of contribution to Terraform, comparing amount of work done from external contributors to the work done by Hashicorp-internal contributors. I know it's hard to make the comparison of what is "harder" work or "more" work in a software project from looking at commits alone, but would be interesting to see nonetheless.
- tux1968 3y ago
  It's not just the work donated via the open source channel, it's also the associated credibility, enthusiastic coverage and referrals, and general good will, that accrues to such a project. None of which they would have enjoyed had they been a private project.
  - galenmarchetti 3y ago
    definitely...and they get to keep that credibility and coverage. at least, as long as this move didn't totally alienate the folks that got on terraform back then
    - zaphar 3y ago
      That credibility largely only applies to a certain group of people. The license change tanked that credibility with that group of people. Hashicorp did a classic misstep for open source based companies and as a may have lost the mindshare and marketshare for one of their most significant offerings. I'm actually not sure they'll survive this.

gobins 3y ago

This is probably going to get a lot flake but what did we expect when big tech started eating up open source solutions and competing with the companies who started the work . MongoDB and AWS is a good example. Hashicorp probably realised that they should preemptively change the licensing before bigger players started using the products to directly compete with them. I want Hashicorp to survive and be profitable. Fact is, for the majority of the users who use terraform, the change in licensing does not impact them.

galenmarchetti 3y ago
True...it's just difficult to draft a license that says something along the lines of "If you're Big Tech, we have the right to go after you, if you're small startup, you're safe". I think there's a swath of Terraform users (likely minority) who find themselves in a legal gray area, or a legal black-and-white area, where they're directly at risk. Even if Hashicorp never intended to target small startups with this, the wording of the license unfortunately applies and is enough to make anyone nervous. I think MongoDB had a similar issue when they went source-available, they seemed to intend to only protect themselves from big tech but unfortunately a lot of smaller players got spooked. I think (?) it's fine now though
- woah 3y ago
  yea, that makes all the difference. If it was almost all Hashicorp, the open source was a marketing gimmick and I don't blame them for not risking the entire business on it. If there was heavy involvement from external contributors, then removing open source is more of a rug pull.
- solomatov 3y ago
  > True...it's just difficult to draft a license that says something along the lines of "If you're Big Tech, we have the right to go after you, if you're small startup, you're safe". Take a look at the license of LLAMA2 by FB. It has a clause just like this. I.e. limit by number of users.
  - 3y ago

firesteelrain 3y ago

I don’t really care what license they use. It gets the job done.

ciroduran 3y ago
It does the job until you have to get legal onboard, and then they will raise issues with the possibility of your startup becoming a competitor to Hashicorp
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  I don’t work in a startup so I am ok (and no plans to)
kstrauser 3y ago
Hashicorp isn't Oracle. It's still always useful to think about license questions in terms of whether it'd be OK if it were Oracle instead. For example, consider: "I don't really care what license Oracle uses. It gets the job done." If you wouldn't say that, and oh how I hope you'd never say that!, then why say it about Hashicorp? So far they've been reasonably decent, license shenanigans aside. However, remember that they're just one acquisition away from that being untrue. The license always matters. Always.
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  I work at a place that will pay for those types of licenses. That’s my point (but we don’t need to because their license doesn’t require anyone to pay for Enterprise or Cloud)

izalutski 3y ago

Yep, backwards they did (Disclosure: I'm from Digger and OpenTF so am biased) Hashi's biggest miscalculation is that they put Terraform (an open language / ecosystem) into the same bucket as Vault and Consul, which are hostable backend applications. BSL makes sense for Vault, just like it does for MongoDB. It is reasonable to prevent others from charging for hosting your code. But with Terraform, the backend part (TF Cloud) was never even open source. And it's not required for Terraform to work. Hashi shot themselves in the foot. Unlike with Vault or Consul, there is enormous vested interest in the community to keep Terraform truly open. Hashi trying to enforce everyone to use their non-oss backend with it will only result in Hashi losing the privileged (and well deserved) position among providers of commercial products in the Terraform ecosystem.

galenmarchetti 3y ago
this is a great point. I've been following your work decently closely but this is the first time I thought about the "hostable" vs "non-hostable" differentiation. And thinking more deeply on it, of course it matters. There's a pretty big distinction and, naively, perhaps their attempt to protect TF Cloud with this doesn't even accomplish what they intended for it to accomplish. If the backend part is the thing...that was never even in contention, anyway. If this is the case, they only managed to hurt the community.
erik_seaberg 3y ago
Architecturally, I think Terraform really ought to be hosted, because otherwise you have to trust everyone with a far-reaching admin cred on his desktop right next to Zoom and maybe BonziBuddy.
- wingmanjd 3y ago
  A small counterpoint: My $DAYJOB's architecture is completely self-hosted (Proxmox, Nomad, etc). I would not prefer to have some external tool managing that infrastructure.
- nightfly 3y ago
  Not if you use "bastion" type hosts, right?

wmf 3y ago

1. The elephant in the room here is VCs that pushed unsustainable pure open source or open core business models during ZIRP. You can't do it right from day one if your investors are pushing you the opposite direction. 2. People keep talking about community contributions but hasn't Hashicorp rejected all contributions for years?

galenmarchetti 3y ago
would love to know a definitive/quantitative answer for #2, for sure. I do think it makes a difference when it comes to the "backstabbing" implications of the change
theptip 3y ago
On 2), you can define contributions narrowly as PRs in the repo, or broadly, as building providers, libraries, and documentation in the ecosystem. I think the latter perhaps makes more sense. Contributing providers, for example, is a massive contribution of labor that Hashi would have had to do themselves if the community didn’t.
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  didn't think about the documentation but that's especially true...it's a massive amount of copy, between all the tutorials, how-tos, educational material, and example code, all mindfully presented in a useful way

eatonphil 3y ago

Well they didn't do it backwards compared to at least some subset of peers. Cockroach: Apache -> BSL https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ Mongo: AGPLv3 -> SSPL https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/16/mongodb-switches-up-its-open-source-license/ Elasticsearch: Apache -> SSPL https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change I am sure there are more I'm forgetting. Edit: Removed MariaDB.

kemitchell 3y ago
Redis Labs, Confluent. Pretty sure I'm forgetting some of the smaller Commons Clause adopters.
galenmarchetti 3y ago
this is a great point...further down the comments, an OpenTF maintainer made a great point that all of these services are "backend hostable" services. Terraform doesn't even have a backend service component...Terraform Cloud does, but not Terraform itself. I didn't contemplate this when writing the article but it seems like this might be a pretty big factor in the reaction to the change. At least to my memory, I don't remember as strong as a pushback from any of these companies changing their licenses
- eatonphil 3y ago
  > I don't remember as strong as a pushback from any of these companies changing their licenses The Elasticsearch backlash was big for what it's worth, both privately inside companies and publicly (AWS forked it).
  - galenmarchetti 3y ago
    ah wow...I guess that begs the question, "will this just blow over". As far as I can tell Elasticsearch continues to do well and is more or less in the clear (could be wrong)
StopHammoTime 3y ago
MariaDB is still GPL. That article references some kind of scaling add on, not the core product.

Axsuul 3y ago

It's too soon to say. Terraform enjoys network effects due to HashiCorp's other tools working well with it out of the box.

JohnMakin 3y ago
Sure I can buy that - but how much? In the last 4 years I've spent probably 60-80% of my time writing terraform for various companies and maybe 5% of that involved a hashicorp product, and arguably, it would have been easier deploying it without terraform. Its main use case is to build cloud infrastructure, not interact with hashicorp products.

kodablah 3y ago

> if you want to start a business building developer tooling and you’re concerned about competitors using your work, you should probably start source-available (BSL) and then go for a license that is OSI-approved To put another way, if you want to start a business, make sure what you're selling you can do better than others. If your business is hosting open source software and you can't do that better than others, then don't make that your business. Maybe you should have been selling non-open-source instead (which they pivoted to now anyways).

pnathan 3y ago

My take is that if I want to run a business on open source, I license as AGPL3 with asterisk. Asterisk: if you want a permissive license, our salespeople are _right around the corner_, and they will take you to a steak dinner with our professional services lead, and you will have a fantastic white glove onboarding, and it will be absolutely lovely for everyone's bottom line.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nunez 3y ago

Going public is 10,000% the reason for this. From what I've seen, once a company goes public, all people care about is growth growth growth, which forces dumb enshittification like this. I'm wondering if selling to Microsoft or someone like that would've been better...

personomas 3y ago
No, they go public because they need more funding. They need more funding because they're not profitable. The reason 100% is because they didn't build a profitable business out of open source, so they have to change it to try to build something sustainable once opportunities for funding run out.

benterix 3y ago

That's a neat advertisement of Kurtosis and I have admit I clicked to see what it does (nothing useful for me - it's for the so-called "Web3").

yMMe2WYE_D 3y ago

Is there an easy way to filter out substack submissions from HN? I find the "newsletter popup in your face" approach more annoying than most ads.

octacat 3y ago

The way to kill open source is by first killing faith in it. MS: we like "open standards", here is our implementation specific stuff. Amazon: we don't care what would be with a project. If it is open source - we host it and get money. If it dies - people will use our closed source solutions. Google: XMPP is soo open, we like XMPP. Oh, now Web is soo open, we like Web (we even have a browser, wondering what would happen once everyone is using one browser). And now everyone loves open source to train AI. We would see less and less open source projects.

KptMarchewa 3y ago

My lesson is - use and contribute to Open Source software as long as it's not controlled by a single company, but donated to a OSS foundation like Apache or CNCF that has a vested interest in keeping things open.

pc_edwin 3y ago

Most of you guys are missing the forest for the trees. HashiCorp has been around for over a decade now and they've never turned a profit. ZIRP is over. If you guys keep sending these companies to the graveyard, there will no longer be an incentive to fund them. Then OSS will be reduced down to projects incubated by FAANG or stuff created by hobbyists. Imagine you are a capital allocator, why would you burn your (LPs) money for what amounts to free R&D for MSFT/GOOGL/AMZN. If you are going trash a company for taking the only viable path to maintain its existence, at the very least provide a feasible alternative.

vb-8448 3y ago
> Then OSS will be reduced down to projects incubated by FAANG or stuff created by hobbyists. Linux, Python and a lot of other OSS born from hobbyists or during high interests rates times. The problem is HashiCorp used VCs money for the wrong purpose.
- pc_edwin 3y ago
  The thing is its not the 90s anymore, pretending otherwise is how you get LibreOffice or Inkscape. Tech has come a long way since the creation of linux or python. Even these projects have gotten to a level of sophistication that it would implode without big tech support. Why do you think you don't see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days? All the ones you see are either incubated inside FAANG or VC backed. To build, grow and maintain anything thats interesting these days will require a group of pretty talented people and these people have plenty of other prospects where they'll get paid pretty well.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Why do you think you don’t see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days? I do, in fact, see interesting OSS tech from hobbyists these days. The VC-backed and FAANG stuff is more visible because it has a bigger promotional budget, and it very often is inherentlty more broadly interesting. But it also tends to be quickly pivoted away from unless it meets quick wide commercial success.

mawadev 3y ago

This leaves the bitterest taste in my mouth: over night a lot of people went from being open source mainters to retroactively being janitors