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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

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.
  - vb-8448 3y ago
    > Even these projects have gotten to a level of sophistication that it would implode without big tech support. The worst thing is that all this FAANG or VC backed companies make a lot of people believe that they are the only viable way. > Why do you think you don't see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days? Actually not true, just an example, https://github.com/drakkan/sftpgo https://github.com/drakkan/sftpgo. But there are plenty of them.
    - pc_edwin 3y ago
      Let say you have a cool pretty printing library on one end and on the other end you had a new kind of in memory data store that is an order of magnitude better in performance and efficiency while providing exceptional horizontal scaling. What I'm getting at with "interesting" are projects that look more like the latter. There are plenty of exceptions where you have projects that fits (barely) into the interesting category while staying just below the complexity threshold that it can be maintained by one guy and a few community contributions. Yet they are still the exception to the rule and even then you often have one of the following outcomes: - The features or the project as a whole get stolen/integrated by FAANG, hobbyist burns out and hobbyist ends up depreciating/archiving the project. - The project gains a lot of momentum and gets supported by FAANG. - Hobbyist burns out and depreciates/archives the project - Hobbyist commercialises the project. P.S. Entropy is a ditch and this is what many of the HN utopians fail to understand, it takes a immense amount of work to build a somewhat self-sustaining entity to fend of entropy. I have theory that its one of the blindspots of being young and technical. You see the world as a massive legacy monolith that you have to refactor into these cool edgy microservices which is super easy and all the problems will be solved and happily ever after. While I don't disagree with parts of the original claim, the solution IMO will end modern civilisation as we know it. I have a bunch of labels for this kind of thinking and the people who preach it but I know señor dang wont be happy about it so I digress..
      - vb-8448 3y ago
        You are a little bit blinded by FAANGs/VCs aura. 1) FAANGs won't exist forever, software/hardware development will continue even after FAANGS will be disassembled by antitrust, go in bankruptcy or stop investing for any other cause. 2) Linux and a lot of other complex software was developed when collaboration was not so easy as today, when GitHub didn't exist and most of the people have very slow internet connection compared to today.

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.
- vb-8448 3y ago
  > Even these projects have gotten to a level of sophistication that it would implode without big tech support. The worst thing is that all this FAANG or VC backed companies make a lot of people believe that they are the only viable way. > Why do you think you don't see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days? Actually not true, just an example, https://github.com/drakkan/sftpgo https://github.com/drakkan/sftpgo. But there are plenty of them.
  - pc_edwin 3y ago
    Let say you have a cool pretty printing library on one end and on the other end you had a new kind of in memory data store that is an order of magnitude better in performance and efficiency while providing exceptional horizontal scaling. What I'm getting at with "interesting" are projects that look more like the latter. There are plenty of exceptions where you have projects that fits (barely) into the interesting category while staying just below the complexity threshold that it can be maintained by one guy and a few community contributions. Yet they are still the exception to the rule and even then you often have one of the following outcomes: - The features or the project as a whole get stolen/integrated by FAANG, hobbyist burns out and hobbyist ends up depreciating/archiving the project. - The project gains a lot of momentum and gets supported by FAANG. - Hobbyist burns out and depreciates/archives the project - Hobbyist commercialises the project. P.S. Entropy is a ditch and this is what many of the HN utopians fail to understand, it takes a immense amount of work to build a somewhat self-sustaining entity to fend of entropy. I have theory that its one of the blindspots of being young and technical. You see the world as a massive legacy monolith that you have to refactor into these cool edgy microservices which is super easy and all the problems will be solved and happily ever after. While I don't disagree with parts of the original claim, the solution IMO will end modern civilisation as we know it. I have a bunch of labels for this kind of thinking and the people who preach it but I know señor dang wont be happy about it so I digress..
    - vb-8448 3y ago
      You are a little bit blinded by FAANGs/VCs aura. 1) FAANGs won't exist forever, software/hardware development will continue even after FAANGS will be disassembled by antitrust, go in bankruptcy or stop investing for any other cause. 2) Linux and a lot of other complex software was developed when collaboration was not so easy as today, when GitHub didn't exist and most of the people have very slow internet connection compared to today.