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What’s the pattern you’re referring to? I’m curious how these infra projects keep AWS/GCP from killing them

by brap 3y ago

lolinder 3y ago
HashiCorp is the latest big name to do it—they switched to the BUSL, which more or less says you can only use the product if you aren't offering it for sale in competition with HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl
- maxloh 3y ago
  That seems to be a fair license to me. The entire codebase will be open-sourced a few years after a version is released. You can use the old version and fix security vulnerabilities yourself. If you really want the latest features, you pay.
  - itsafarqueue 3y ago
    Doesn’t this turn on the definition of competition (in the license). I remember reading about a bunch of game and server tech being in very murky water following the license change. If they ever decide to enter your specific business they have an automatic kill switch on you.
nonameiguess 3y ago
If your product is sufficiently complex, you may have organizational expertise in running it that the cloud providers can't match, though I can't think of any examples of this. There security requirements like fips-validation and released STIGs that make organizations depend on your product. Off the top of my head, other than these, I can't think of anything RHEL offers that Amazon Linux doesn't, but plenty of orgs still choose the RHEL ami for their EC2s. Some orgs may want or be required to self-host. Some orgs may use your cloud but only in a FedRamp-accredited or classified enclave, where many managed services available in the commercial enclave are not available or not yet approved by your sponsoring agency. I don't know how much of a moat this constitutes for vendors like Elastic, though. Those markets are inherently smaller than what they hoped to get out of managed Elastic cloud, and more labor-intensive to service. It's more of a moat for the big five defense contractors and why Raytheon is still writing all the software for spy satellites rather than Google and Lockheed does all the hardware rather than SpaceX. Of course, they're not open source, but the contracts usually specify the government owns your code, not you, and they can share it with any other contractor they choose if they want to replace you.

What’s the pattern you’re referring to? I’m curious how these infra projects keep AWS/GCP from killing them

by brap 3y ago

What’s the pattern you’re referring to? I’m curious how these infra projects keep AWS/GCP from killing them

HashiCorp is the latest big name to do it—they switched to the BUSL, which more or less says you can only use the product if you aren't offering it for sale in competition with HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl

maxloh 3y ago
That seems to be a fair license to me. The entire codebase will be open-sourced a few years after a version is released. You can use the old version and fix security vulnerabilities yourself. If you really want the latest features, you pay.
- itsafarqueue 3y ago
  Doesn’t this turn on the definition of competition (in the license). I remember reading about a bunch of game and server tech being in very murky water following the license change. If they ever decide to enter your specific business they have an automatic kill switch on you.

nonameiguess 3y ago

If your product is sufficiently complex, you may have organizational expertise in running it that the cloud providers can't match, though I can't think of any examples of this. There security requirements like fips-validation and released STIGs that make organizations depend on your product. Off the top of my head, other than these, I can't think of anything RHEL offers that Amazon Linux doesn't, but plenty of orgs still choose the RHEL ami for their EC2s. Some orgs may want or be required to self-host. Some orgs may use your cloud but only in a FedRamp-accredited or classified enclave, where many managed services available in the commercial enclave are not available or not yet approved by your sponsoring agency. I don't know how much of a moat this constitutes for vendors like Elastic, though. Those markets are inherently smaller than what they hoped to get out of managed Elastic cloud, and more labor-intensive to service. It's more of a moat for the big five defense contractors and why Raytheon is still writing all the software for spy satellites rather than Google and Lockheed does all the hardware rather than SpaceX. Of course, they're not open source, but the contracts usually specify the government owns your code, not you, and they can share it with any other contractor they choose if they want to replace you.