3 ms·

By the way, are there any plans for taking on other HashiCorp products as well? (Packer and Nomad are of particular interest to me :-)

echelon 3y ago
The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad. Open Source businesses have no future in a world where big tech can gulp your product for free. The OpenTofu folks will probably even raise capital to support commercialization of their thing at some point.
- tacticus 3y ago
  > The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad. save themselves from others building a less shit version of terraform cloud.
  - benterix 3y ago
    This will happen anyway; what they could do is to gain some time, that's all. But long-term consequences will be serious, I'm not sure if it was worth it.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  HashiCorp could pull it off, but I think moving everything to BSL overnight is just way too aggressive. I also don't think it's Amazon they are afraid of, but rather the other “cloud Terraform” providers (who unsurprisingly are the ones behind the fork). For my own project [1], I'm planning on keeping the basic edition open and maybe adding an enterprise edition later on under BSL – basically like MariaDB does. I think that's the most fair model you can do right now. [1]: https://lunni.dev/ https://lunni.dev/, a Docker Swarm dashboard
- jnsaff2 3y ago
  Which HashiCorp OSS product is Amazon hosting for clients as part of their cloud offering? Their stuff pretty much all competes with it.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  I generally like your takes but this one isn't very good since it wasn't Amazon that was the threat. HashiCorp couldn't compete. Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. I worked at two companies who rejected them because their pricing was so ludicrous. The TACoS space of small startups nimbly out-competed these bad offerings. Rent-seeking because you weren't able to compete with tiny startups able to effectively value add where you didn't is a bad strategy that pisses people off. I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends. Corporations didn't seem to understand that when you participate in the OSS ecosystem you don't just get to trade on the name recognition. Or if you do, and you renege on those promises, you're going to get a lot of people very angry. So now we have companies going BSL because they didn't have a good business plan to begin with and this is their dying gasp to own the space so someone will pay them and not their much smarter, more creative, startup competitors.
  - georgyo 3y ago
    This, so much this. HashiCorp pricing just made it simply impossible to pay them. Their plan was to provide a free offering that was very good, get companies hooked, and then charge our the nose for any enterprisy feature. The problem was how they charged, which they don't reveal until after you contact sales. You could build a solution using the free offering that works very well. Then years later want something paid offerings and contact sales and find out that they charge over 1000USD per clients, and you have 1000 clients. Oops, guess I'm just going to engineer my own solution for that. 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational. It's really hard to go to management and say this open source thing we are running and serving the companies needs will now cost millions of dollars. Though I understand HashiCorp position somewhat. I'm sure their sales team has repeatedly heard that a potential client has decided they don't need the feature they called about since the free solution is good enough and can engineer around any short commons.
    - Terretta 3y ago
      > 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp. Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost. At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.
- epolanski 3y ago
  I have mixed feelings about that. Yes, doing money on open source is hard, but on the other hand, the reason why you were successful was because you were open source in the first place and capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors which would've neither contributed nor adopted your product otherwise. Imho, if you can't compete with other cloud offerings of your products then your cloud offering is weak. Competing with Amazon on prices is obviously hard, but not impossible, and it's easy to compete with them on customer service because it's your goddamn product and you should have the best expertise on it.
  - theK 3y ago
    > capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors Does this hypothesis really hold up? In my experience the contributor community remains small and often even dormant compared to the userbase of an opensource project only to take action if the project itself gets in turmoil (main developer leaves, bad takes on features etc.)
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      In the case of terraform the main interesting bit is not terraform itself but the modules. What is the ratio of terraform dev vs third party dev in most popular terraform modules?
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Open Source businesses have no future as Open Source businesses if they aren't using Open Source licences. What I find odd in these situations, that have happened multiple times now, is the companies go straight from "weak" licenses like the MPL, straight to "source available" ones. Surely it would have been a good idea to try a strong copyleft licence like AGPL first.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    AGPL is seen as a no-go by most companies. It's viewed as risky because the obligations associated with it are often unclear.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      Surely those companies can pay for an alternative license then?
      - FridgeSeal 3y ago
        I’ve had this argument with people ad infinitum; it seems some people just see “AGPL” and any further thought process just stops. “You could ask or pay for an alternate licence” or “you’re almost certainly not using this in a way that means you need to open source your entire product” and any other rational argument you can think of are just met with “yeah but agpl” and that’s apparently just the end of it.
        ghaff 3y ago
        The thing is, at that point, why not just put it under a proprietary license in the first place? Lots of companies simply don’t have AGPL on their list of legal approved open source licenses and they’re not going to change that for you. ADDED: If you want to go the dual licensing route, at least just state this up front.
        SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago

echelon 3y ago

The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad. Open Source businesses have no future in a world where big tech can gulp your product for free. The OpenTofu folks will probably even raise capital to support commercialization of their thing at some point.

tacticus 3y ago
> The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad. save themselves from others building a less shit version of terraform cloud.
- benterix 3y ago
  This will happen anyway; what they could do is to gain some time, that's all. But long-term consequences will be serious, I'm not sure if it was worth it.
notpushkin 3y ago
HashiCorp could pull it off, but I think moving everything to BSL overnight is just way too aggressive. I also don't think it's Amazon they are afraid of, but rather the other “cloud Terraform” providers (who unsurprisingly are the ones behind the fork). For my own project [1], I'm planning on keeping the basic edition open and maybe adding an enterprise edition later on under BSL – basically like MariaDB does. I think that's the most fair model you can do right now. [1]: https://lunni.dev/ https://lunni.dev/, a Docker Swarm dashboard
jnsaff2 3y ago
Which HashiCorp OSS product is Amazon hosting for clients as part of their cloud offering? Their stuff pretty much all competes with it.
emptysongglass 3y ago
I generally like your takes but this one isn't very good since it wasn't Amazon that was the threat. HashiCorp couldn't compete. Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. I worked at two companies who rejected them because their pricing was so ludicrous. The TACoS space of small startups nimbly out-competed these bad offerings. Rent-seeking because you weren't able to compete with tiny startups able to effectively value add where you didn't is a bad strategy that pisses people off. I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends. Corporations didn't seem to understand that when you participate in the OSS ecosystem you don't just get to trade on the name recognition. Or if you do, and you renege on those promises, you're going to get a lot of people very angry. So now we have companies going BSL because they didn't have a good business plan to begin with and this is their dying gasp to own the space so someone will pay them and not their much smarter, more creative, startup competitors.
- georgyo 3y ago
  This, so much this. HashiCorp pricing just made it simply impossible to pay them. Their plan was to provide a free offering that was very good, get companies hooked, and then charge our the nose for any enterprisy feature. The problem was how they charged, which they don't reveal until after you contact sales. You could build a solution using the free offering that works very well. Then years later want something paid offerings and contact sales and find out that they charge over 1000USD per clients, and you have 1000 clients. Oops, guess I'm just going to engineer my own solution for that. 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational. It's really hard to go to management and say this open source thing we are running and serving the companies needs will now cost millions of dollars. Though I understand HashiCorp position somewhat. I'm sure their sales team has repeatedly heard that a potential client has decided they don't need the feature they called about since the free solution is good enough and can engineer around any short commons.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    > 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp. Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost. At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.
epolanski 3y ago
I have mixed feelings about that. Yes, doing money on open source is hard, but on the other hand, the reason why you were successful was because you were open source in the first place and capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors which would've neither contributed nor adopted your product otherwise. Imho, if you can't compete with other cloud offerings of your products then your cloud offering is weak. Competing with Amazon on prices is obviously hard, but not impossible, and it's easy to compete with them on customer service because it's your goddamn product and you should have the best expertise on it.
- theK 3y ago
  > capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors Does this hypothesis really hold up? In my experience the contributor community remains small and often even dormant compared to the userbase of an opensource project only to take action if the project itself gets in turmoil (main developer leaves, bad takes on features etc.)
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    In the case of terraform the main interesting bit is not terraform itself but the modules. What is the ratio of terraform dev vs third party dev in most popular terraform modules?
RobotToaster 3y ago
Open Source businesses have no future as Open Source businesses if they aren't using Open Source licences. What I find odd in these situations, that have happened multiple times now, is the companies go straight from "weak" licenses like the MPL, straight to "source available" ones. Surely it would have been a good idea to try a strong copyleft licence like AGPL first.
- ghaff 3y ago
  AGPL is seen as a no-go by most companies. It's viewed as risky because the obligations associated with it are often unclear.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    Surely those companies can pay for an alternative license then?
    - FridgeSeal 3y ago
      I’ve had this argument with people ad infinitum; it seems some people just see “AGPL” and any further thought process just stops. “You could ask or pay for an alternate licence” or “you’re almost certainly not using this in a way that means you need to open source your entire product” and any other rational argument you can think of are just met with “yeah but agpl” and that’s apparently just the end of it.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        The thing is, at that point, why not just put it under a proprietary license in the first place? Lots of companies simply don’t have AGPL on their list of legal approved open source licenses and they’re not going to change that for you. ADDED: If you want to go the dual licensing route, at least just state this up front.
        SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago