15 ms·

Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead

240 points by ngetchell 2y ago

gnabgib 2y ago
HN title guidelines[0]: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- WJW 2y ago
  It's weird because in this case you could also read it as "Jeff Geerling says that corporate open source is dead", which just happens to be posted on his personal blog that has a domain name which is his personal name. It's not as if it's the site that called "Jeff Geerling" after all.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    The title should be as posted on the blog, it would be weird if he put Jeff Geerling there (and he didn't). Rule's the same for bloggers without their name (obviously) in the domain, e.g. Julia Evans at jvns.ca is often submitted; not with a 'Julia Evans:' prefix.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      > The title should be as posted on the blog Seems the HTML <title> attribute of his page is "Corporate Open Source Is Dead | Jeff Geerling". OK, that's not "Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead" like on this HN page, but it's certainly not "jeffgeerling.com" either. The difference between a "Jeff Geerling:" prefix and a "| Jeff Geerling" suffix is rather small in comparison. So what, exactly, is "as posted on the blog"? >it would be weird if he put Jeff Geerling there (and he didn't). It's not like the main title within the page is just "Corporate Open Source Is Dead" either; there's a more prominent "Jeff Geerling" above that. So yes, he did. (Personally, I usually go with what's displayed on the browser window title / tab, i.e. the <title> attribute. AFAICR.)
leetharris 2y ago
Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady. I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative. I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work, they need to pivot to something that does work.
- kevingadd 2y ago
  If you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.
  - adrianN 2y ago
    You could make it AGPL if you don’t want that.
    - kevingadd 2y ago
      Not unless all the contributors signed an Evil CLA first so I can relicense it :-)
      - adrianN 2y ago
        I start all my stuff with AGPL .
        vertis 2y ago
        Haha jokes on you. I sucked your AGPL code into my LLM and now you have to prove I'm actually using your code when it generates the same thing. Good luck with that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
shkkmo 2y ago
So the TLDR; is don't trust any corporate open source that requires a CLA and don't contribute to those projects unless you are prepared to fork if the rug gets pulled.
- TheRealPomax 2y ago
  Any project with a CLA was already subject to that stipulation. You get to do work for a company for free with the added benefit that you're now also on the hook for any legal problems that might arise from the code you contributed. What a deal, you get to put in the time and effort AND potentially fight a legal battle when a patent troll decides to go "wouldn't it be fun if" all on your own!
iforgotpassword 2y ago
> By working on a project with a CLA, where you sign away your code, you're giving carte blanche for the company to take away your freedom to use their software. Ok it's been a while so I don't remember the details or how it played out, but when Linux introduced a CoC, there were people who contributed to the kernel in the past that threatened to withdraw their code from the kernel, which would've been a nightmare to handle and clean up. How much power does a contributor have if my project is using a standard licence like GPL or BSD? Does the contributor hold any copyright over their code? Im not talking about rug pulls here, let's just say the contributor gets really mad at me for some reason.
- goku12 2y ago
  I think that the developer can demand a withdrawal of their contribution, though I don't know what happens to the code that's already published under a FOSS license. Regardless, many projects including the Linux kernel require the developer to sign off their contributions under the terms of the 'developer certificate of origin' [1]. While the developer retains the copyright to the contribution under DCO, they acknowledge that it will be distributed in perpetuity under the original license. So, retracting the contribution may not be an option. [1] https://developercertificate.org/ https://developercertificate.org/
  - Macha 2y ago
    The main purpose of a DCO is to take the portion of a CLA that guarantees the developer actually has a right to license the code under the project's license, as it's something that some users worry about using the software without. Basically so if someone copies some code from one of the Windows leaks into Linux and Microsoft comes to sue the Linux Foundation over it, they can point to it and say "we had legal sign off they had the right to license this code, please sue them instead". In terms of irrevocability, the DCO is not that different from most open source licenses who themselves claim to be perpetual. The arguments for exceptions to that being true all either apply to e.g. both the GPL and the DCO, or to neither. Generally the consensus is that an irrevocable license grant means irrevocable, though there are some concerns about examples set by e.g. the precedent that lets artists claw back rights from record labels after 30 years.
Cheer2171 2y ago
"Corporate Open Source" is many things. Look at how many companies are paying for membership on the Linux Foundation Board: Platinum costs $500k a year, gold is $100k a year, and silver is $5-20k based on size: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  Linux foundation was never about Linux or open source. quite the contrary. the foundation started as a way for companies to band Against gpl. and they won the day Linus have up and allowed tainted kernel be the default and every device distributor moved their proprietary code to modules and rejoiced. their focus then was on gpl3 fud because google et al have much more money than modem vendors.
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    Unfortunately true. I like to call the Linux foundation the megacorporations LUG (Linux user group). They want to use Linux alright, but they would prefer to do with it whatever they want, so they are not really friends of the GPL and a few other things.
  - calibas 2y ago
    The resistance to GPL isn't just companies, I think you'll find the average programmer prefers using libraries licensed under MIT when given the choice. It seems like there's a kind of political ideology over what "open source" even means and how it should be practiced.There's a school of thought that says we should switch everything over to viral copyleft licenses. This will "protect" the code and ensure all derivative work is always open source. Then there's others, like myself, who believe if you want something that's truly "free and open" it should come with as few conditions as possible.
    - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
      What about LGPL? It used to be everywhere when people were using SourceForge - but post-GitHub it seems to have dropped-off in popularity. When libs are distributed as binaries (.NET, Java, etc) it feels LGPL vs MIT/Apache is moot as hardly anyone actually modifies libraries, it seems. I wonder how different it is for Go and C/C++…
NuSkooler 2y ago
TL;DR: Once again, capitalism takes it's toll.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Always remember: It's either AGPLv3 or proprietary all rights reserved. Anything else means you're giving your labor away for free to the beggar barons. Biggest wealth transfer in history, from developers and straight into the pockets of billionaires. It's just irrational. Also remember: Whoever owns the copyright gets to do whatever they want. The licensing security of free software, defined here as the likelihood of free software remaining free software, is proportional to the number of copyright owners involved. Changing the license requires agreement between all copyright holders, once a sizeable number of them has built up it becomes all but impossible. Therefore, anyone who asks you to assign your copyright to them should be viewed with suspicion. A true proponent of free software would want to maximize the number of copyright holders involved, not centralize the copyrights under a single entity.
- busterarm 2y ago
  Maybe I like writing software that I don't bother to monetize but allows anyone who wants to come along and use it to eat to do so. Don't give things away if you care about what happens to them afterwards. So many people completely misunderstand what open source is about.
  - matheusmoreira 2y ago
    > Don't give things away That's exactly the point I was making. My whole point was: DO NOT just give things away. That's just irrational. It brings you no profit and doesn't actually create long lasting wealth and freedom in the form of copyleft software. All it does is enable your exploitation. All it does is enrich billionaire corporations who are free to take the work of others, use it to make a killing and then laugh all the way to the bank at the suckers who made it all possible for free. Don't just give your code away for free. Either make it proprietary all rights reserved, or make it AGPLv3. Those are the two choices. Maximum profit or maximum freedom. Either they pay you lots of money, or they adhere to the full set of conditions spelled out by the AGPLv3. Don't just give your stuff away. Attach lots of strings to it. Strings that force others to benefit you in return for your generosity. Either by paying you lots of money or by being equally generous to you in return. Don't just give software away. That was the point. There is exactly one scenario where "permissive" licensing makes sense: a world without copyright. In other words, a world without licensing at all. They can copy your software and you can copy theirs. Until such a day comes that copyright is abolished though, "permissive" licensing is just nonsense, it just gives away all your leverage.
stuff4ben 2y ago
I don't blame the big corps like IBM (disclaimer: I work there, I don't speak for them) and Microsoft and Google. I really blame investors who are looking to get their money back. When they force an IPO but there's no business model to sustain the company, this is what happens. CEOs resort to developer-hostile actions which kills off the community and generates ill-will towards the company. People here shit on "lifestyle companies" but IMO that's the best model for sustainablility and developer communities (if that's what you're into).
- Ekaros 2y ago
  If you offer something for free. And it becomes popular partly because it is free. Well it should be pretty clear that there is not huge money in free product... And at some level someone packaging with some margin your free product is well...
ergonaught 2y ago
Products aren't projects, which has confused people for decades. If open source products retreating from some of the "freedom" elements bothers you, then you should be focusing your ire on the megacorporations and overfunded startups who simply refuse to contribute to the financial viability of the products that sustain them. For some reason "we" celebrate the exploitative, though, so I guess that's out.
- nrawe 2y ago
  Yep. The author complains that there used to be plucky startups with Open Core business models who've now gone "extinct", while simultaneously sharpening their pitchforks because those same companies got successful and _slightly_ amended their licenses to prevent loosing revenue against IaaS giants so that they can, in turn, continue innovating. I guess money grows on trees where they live.
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    The projects I think of most are redis and ansible—both of which I've used extensively, and quickly went from 'neat thing I spotted on Hacker News' to 'now it's a startup', then a few years later 'it's just another corporation, the open source project is buried somewhere deep inside'. The projects weren't as much open core as they were literal open source projects made to solve some problem the author had with other existing tooling. The open core part was injected when the startup decided it had to turn into a platform to sustain the beefy staffing budgets while they figured out how to generate revenue off something that was freely available.
    - radlad 2y ago
      You can add nginx to the list as well.
    - nemothekid 2y ago
      I'm not sure what the alternative is or what you are advocating. Antirez stopped working on Redis 4 years ago. We were lucky someone created Redis "for the love of the game". Now before you there are a couple options 1. Antirez2 pops up and works on Redis because they love working on Redis 2. Someone is incentivized, with money, to work on Redis. (1) didn't happen, so we must go with (2), and with (2) comes the problem of the actual business model that will be used to sustain (2). A. Donations/Support contracts B. Open "Core" aka I'm the only one allowed to sell this as SaaS. Method (A) has shown to be an abject failure while AWS takes your revenue. Companies have successfully chosen method (B). Either you have a method (C) in mind, or you just aren't being reasonable in asking people to work on OSS for free. You can be mad about the "rugpull", but between the choice of "rugpull" and abandon the project, I don't see how "rugpull" is the worse option
renewiltord 2y ago
If you can't capture sufficient value, you're not going to be able to make a business around it. The problem isn't value creation, which the OSS model does do. The problem is value capture. That's why so many people go around saying "We need to pay X more". That's a sign that creation and capture have a gap. You'll see that with traditional open-source. With companies that attempt to capture the value, your customers will always hate you unless you're careful. Of course using the Elastic license family from the beginning is one way there. The Llama license family is another way. But perhaps my favourite observed thing has to be Kong's licensing: the base thing is Apache 2.0 but when you sign a contract with them, they'll give you access to the Enterprise plugins and you can edit their source. I loved working with them. They seem to have done a good job with value capture. I think they're leaving a lot on the table, but there is significant path dependence on what they've done, so they don't have the option any more. But good job.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
buildfocus 2y ago
There are uses for CLAs besides rug pulls. For example, if you want to offer software as AGPL, accept community contributions, but be able to _also_ offer a non-AGPL option to paying customers (who effectively pay to be allowed to integrate the license without themselves being subject to licensing risk). Quite a few big orgs have a full ban on internal use of AGPL software so this can be very valuable. That requires a CLA (as I understand it, IANAL) because you're relicensing a contributor's contribution. At the same time though, I wouldn't consider it a rugpull - contributors lose nothing here, and the open source project gains a funding mechanism (a rare thing in open source).
- cogman10 2y ago
  Funnily, one of the best places for this in practice (IMO) is microsoft. Who is now, again funnily enough, GPLing a lot of their software but have CLAs so they can do long term support for people that want to pay for it. Latest versions stay fully open source while back ported fixes are a paid feature if you don't keep your software up to date. That, to me, is a win win. Oracle is doing the same with the JDK.
  - jabl 2y ago
    > Funnily, one of the best places for this in practice (IMO) is microsoft. Who is now, again funnily enough, GPLing a lot of their software but have CLAs so they can do long term support for people that want to pay for it. Huh, what software is MS releasing under the GPL now?
    - cogman10 2y ago
      Not as much as I thought. MIT is more common it looks like. https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/repositories?q=license%3Agpl https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/repositories?q=license%3Ag...
      - int_19h 2y ago
        MIT is the standard OSS license for Microsoft stuff that is open source. You also see Apache for some projects that predate standardization on MIT, and GPL where there's no way to avoid it (i.e. when you have to build on code that is itself GPL). That said, peak OSS at Microsoft is already past. These days, it's all about advertising products as OSS while quietly close-sourcing parts of it (e.g. just about the only thing in VSCode that's fully open source is JS support, every other language extension is closed to some extent).
amouat 2y ago
The declining share price and profits is exactly what made it possible for IBM to buy Hashicorp. The license change didn't juice things -- it watered down the price. $6 billion is a snip compared to the $14 billion IPO valuation. Fintan Ryan has a nice write-up here: https://medium.com/@fintanr/on-ibm-acquiring-hashicorp-c9c73a40d20c https://medium.com/@fintanr/on-ibm-acquiring-hashicorp-c9c73...
TheDudeMan 2y ago
I just watched this interesting Node.js doc (Open-source Node.js was purchased by a corp and there was some drama along the way). https://youtu.be/LB8KwiiUGy0 https://youtu.be/LB8KwiiUGy0
deathanatos 2y ago
> And they're not even a pointless AI company! Are you sure? (/s), because IBM mentioned "AI" no less than 10 times in their announcement of the purchase: > AI-driven application growth … IBM's deep focus and investment in […] AI … The global excitement surrounding generative AI … HashiCorp's capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era … generative AI deployment continues to grow … IBM's commitment to […] AI innovation … today's AI revolution … AI-driven complexity … IBM is a leading provider of global […] AI, … IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI Thankfully the press managed to delete most of those, though there were some announcement that nonetheless took the bait.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  Ah, maybe IBM was duped into thinking HashiCorp was an AI play?
  - Aissen 2y ago
    Obviously, you discover and talk to AI services with consul, store AI secrets in vault, deploy AI platform nomad with AI infrastructure software terraform.
j-cheong 2y ago
I think the anger comes from the rug pull, not that they chose to be source available, right? If they chose to be source available from day 1, then no harm done?
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  Yep; though HashiCorp would be a much smaller company had they not started with an open source license.
Decabytes 2y ago
I'm glad Jeff pointed out the RMS article on Free software > For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software. > “Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.” > We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters. What we advocate is not “open source,” and what we oppose is not “closed source.” To make this clear, we avoid using those terms. People in the FOSS world has been beating this drum since the very beginning. Free software was always an ideology. I get that that turns people off, just like projects wrapped up in religion and politics do, but it's the only way to ensure that stuff like this doesn't happen. I concede that the people who champion FOSS are not always the kindest people to be around, see the response from people about Guix when I mentioned it as an alternative to Nix. But when I was in Boston I was a card carrying member of the FSF. I went to a few libre planets, and I met some real nice people in real life who also cared about FOSS very deeply, so I know not everyone in the community is a jerk.
- downrightmike 2y ago
  "What we advocate is not “open source,” and what we oppose is not “closed source.” I have zero idea what this means and I've been on Debian since Woody
  - runjake 2y ago
    The GNU philosophy believes Free Software[1] and Open Source are two different things[2]. 1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html 2. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
  - 2y ago
qwertox 2y ago
It's basically become market research where the amount of devs which get hooked indicate success and these devs also double as the client (a trap). I try to stay with my stack, which also makes me miss out on things like the highly recommended Tailscale-service.
Pannoniae 2y ago
None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it, and prevent others from exploiting you in the process. Hyperscalers like Amazon exploit OSS projects by reselling them as a cloud service and they earn a gigantic sum in the process. But this is not a neutral thing to do - the OSS project is still responsible for maintenance! (And in many places, the "no warranty" clause seems completely disregarded - users and corporations demand bugfixes since it's a "critical library") The most telling sentence is "Open source culture relies on trust. Trust that companies you and I helped build (even without being on the payroll) wouldn't rugpull."... where is any trust in exploiting someone's work without giving anything back? the hyperscalers routinely break the OSS social contract, but because they abide to the letter of the licences, they get a free pass and many white knights from even the OSS community and even OSI itself. A business model of "you can see the source, you can modify it but you can't offer it as a service or resell my work" is much more honest and trustworthy than the "develop a library, a cloud service picks it up then pressures you with PRs and issues until you permanently burn out from the whole thing" This is partly addressed by the post - "But you know what? I'd just prefer honesty. If revenue is so dependent on selling software, just... make the software proprietary. Don't be so coy!". This is not honesty though. Claiming that anything not party-approved.... I mean OSI-approved is not open source and it's proprietary is a very myopic thing. For users and developers, it's much more beneficial if they can see or even modify the source even if they don't have an unrestricted right to use and modify it however they want. This absolutist, black-and-white approach could potentially lead to many pieces of software becoming fully proprietary, all-rights-reserved in the future since the open source community harasses source available projects quite frequently, and not many have the patience to put up with that. And that would be a sad outcome indeed for user freedom, repairability, portability and other values RMS and the FSF dearly holds.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it... Should OSS solve that "problem"? Free software predates billion-dollar OSS / open-core companies, it also doesn't require the maintainer directly earn a living from it. Perhaps the era of OSS megacorps and the concomitant VC/startup dreams is setting, as these large, formerly OSS companies are rejecting OSS licenses in favor of bigger profits. To that, I say good riddance, not every useful git repository has to be incorporated. > ...and prevent others from exploiting you in the process. The whole point of free and open source software is anyone can use it and improve it - including Amazon and the person you hate. An OSS license is not a growth-hack for adoption: if you want to discourage Amazon from using your product, use AGPL. If you're worried others won't use your AGPL software, then you're growth-hacking. FL/OSS will be fine between evening/weekend hackers (xz), small-to-medium companies/consultancies (Rails), and our neo-feudal tech overlords (React).
bsnnkv 2y ago
I recently re-licensed a large open source project from MIT to a source-available license which restricts redistribution after someone decided to fork it, completely rearrange the code and introduce subtle breaking interface changes, and then package it up with basic Electron UI for sale on a platform digital store. I don't know what the answer is, but the OSI definition is clearly not built to withstand this era of late stage capitalism and the "hustle culture" that permeates through it.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  Trademark law should handle this (at least in some countries). Register a trademark and then send a cease and desist to the fork as they are creating confusion in the marketplace by distributing something they created using your registered name. Perhaps consider using Apache 2.0 license, section six has language that specifically addresses trademarks.
  - wmf 2y ago
    A lot of open source devs are allergic to promoting their work so owning the trademark won't help them. For example, the above developer could have created their own official GUI and put it in the app store but they won't. Realistically the value is in GUIs, SaaS, marketing, etc. not in backend code.
    - bsnnkv 2y ago
      Replying to both parent comments here: I do a fair bit of promotion on YouTube[1] which has resulted in a vibrant community around the software, and I am now creating an official, free GUI[2]. In this specific case even if there had been a trademark in place, the person in question had not used the name of the project at all, but had decided to aggressively market it in community spaces. Ultimately after much reflection and experiencing first hand how easy it is for people to abuse (in my opinion) the option of deliberately hard-forking and introducing breaking changes to funnel people towards a paid piece of software (in this case, a GUI) that will _only_ work with their hard-fork, I concluded that preventing this kind of ecosystem fragmentation is more important to me than an "OSI-approved" badge. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@LGUG2Z https://www.youtube.com/@LGUG2Z [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZKjBMt4kZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZKjBMt4kZ4
8organicbits 2y ago
I started (and just published) a website[1] that tries to track relicensing risks across a number of OSS projects. The current methodology looks at trademark holders, licenses, and CLA/DCO requirements. I think there's community value in educating develpers, surfacing risks, tracking when a project changes it's posture, and promoting forks. If this sort of thing is interesting to you, I'm looking to expand the project listing with community support. I suspect the relicensing trend is on its way up. [1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/ https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Most successful open source projects are actually backed by companies and most of those projects are of course alive and kicking. The entire fortune 500 runs on software and the most of that consists of massive amounts of open source with some sprinklings of proprietary stuff mixed in. Linux would have stayed a silly hobby project without the possibility for this. What's dead, or rather was never really that much alive is the notion of not quite so open source projects where a single corporate entity attempts to dictate the rules and actively discourages outside contributions, and people profiting from "their" source code. As a proportion of most widely used OSS software the amount of software and the number of developers involved with it is a rounding error. There are two main problems with corporate OSS: 1) it stifles the formation of a healthy community of outside contributors. This endangers long term success of projects. The more restrictions exist (e.g. copy right transfers or aggressively anti commercial usage licenses like AGPL), the more likely it is that would be contributors will take the hint and stay away. 2) it limits growth to the strategy, financial success, and imagination/skills of just one company. Because with projects being bottle necked on the financial success of just one company and cut of from outside help, absolutely nothing happens unless that one company pays for it. And with finances effectively supplied by VC investors interested more in IPOs and quick exits than good software, OSS is just a buzzword that goes on the investor deck and not something they actively value or appreciate. Hence legal monstrosities like BSL that make no sense whatsoever from the point of view of nurturing a healthy community of external developers. Most VC companies of course fail. That kind of is the point. And most of their restrictively licensed software projects die along with them and don't survive the implosion of these companies. Developers move onto other things and the software gets peddled to hedge-funds or companies like IBM. The only exception to this is properly licensed open source that can simply be forked. Oracle, Redis, Red Hat, Hashicorp, Elasticsearch, etc. found that out the hard way. The answer is not getting more proprietary about OSS software and preventing forks. The software gets forked precisely because these projects are too valuable to let it rot away behind corporate pay walls. This is not a failure of open source but actually a huge success. The software will long survive the misguided corporate shenanigans. The software and community will be fine. Those companies, possibly a lot less.
- pjmlp 2y ago
flerchin 2y ago
Teraform and serverless doing the exact same thing at the exact same time really indicates that the market conditions that allowed for software like this was not long term sustainable. As a builder that leverages them both, I'm saddened, but I get it.
pjmlp 2y ago
What is dead is the utopian dream that making companies whose main product is raw software, is possible to do in a sustainable way, while keeping everything open source. There are bills to pay, donations only give so much, very few buy books from community members, consulting doesn't apply to all software, trainings even less, not everything can be a SaaS,...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tzs 2y ago
OT: if the author of the article sees this, there's an error in a quote. You quote HN user skywhopper as saying > HashiCorp already did a great job pre-draining all their flavor but their quote actually says [1] > HashiCorp has done a good job of pre-draining any flavor it once had [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135686
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  Ah sorry about that, was paraphrasing for the video, but the blog post should have the direct quote since I don't have a snapshot. I'll update the page when I'm back at my computer later!
getcrunk 2y ago
This goes against the foss ethos but given that foss is ultimately rooted in freedom I think what I will suggest can be reconciled with the primary principle. I’ve been thinking the only way to truly protect freedom of individuals and of foss development is to have a dual license which is foss unless you deploy it to over 10m users or 10m revenue or belong to list of companies like the eu designated gatekeepers. In that case each project should have the latitude to decide if they will enforce terms if any. Meaning that given the needs of the developers being otherwise met they can always forego any additional requirements
jratkevic 2y ago
What is C
penguin_booze 2y ago
> Bryan Cantrill's been sounding the alarm for years—yes, that Bryan Cantrill, the one who posted this gem The video is of Brendan Gregg, not of Bryan. Am I missing something?
- nsteel 2y ago
  Yes: Bryan posted the video of Brendan shouting.
throwaway984393 2y ago
[dead]
zhengiszen 2y ago
In 2024 a whole lot of ideals have been shattered... It is a wake up call for each one of us

240 points by ngetchell 2y ago

HN title guidelines[0]: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

WJW 2y ago
It's weird because in this case you could also read it as "Jeff Geerling says that corporate open source is dead", which just happens to be posted on his personal blog that has a domain name which is his personal name. It's not as if it's the site that called "Jeff Geerling" after all.
- OJFord 2y ago
  The title should be as posted on the blog, it would be weird if he put Jeff Geerling there (and he didn't). Rule's the same for bloggers without their name (obviously) in the domain, e.g. Julia Evans at jvns.ca is often submitted; not with a 'Julia Evans:' prefix.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > The title should be as posted on the blog Seems the HTML <title> attribute of his page is "Corporate Open Source Is Dead | Jeff Geerling". OK, that's not "Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead" like on this HN page, but it's certainly not "jeffgeerling.com" either. The difference between a "Jeff Geerling:" prefix and a "| Jeff Geerling" suffix is rather small in comparison. So what, exactly, is "as posted on the blog"? >it would be weird if he put Jeff Geerling there (and he didn't). It's not like the main title within the page is just "Corporate Open Source Is Dead" either; there's a more prominent "Jeff Geerling" above that. So yes, he did. (Personally, I usually go with what's displayed on the browser window title / tab, i.e. the <title> attribute. AFAICR.)

leetharris 2y ago

Source available from the beginning is ethical. Open source that becomes something else is shady. I am glad they tried. I know there's lots of cynical stuff on the internet, but realistically the open source progress on stuff like Terraform or similar wouldn't have happened if these companies didn't try an alternative. I'm not sure what people want these companies to do. If there's no money, if the idea didn't work, they need to pivot to something that does work.

kevingadd 2y ago
If you do actual open source and your product is any good, somebody else is just going to repackage it and sell it, either as SAAS/IAAS or as a boxed product. So why not get there first? It's depressing. That's been my experience every time I gave code away, at least. Somebody else made money off it.
- adrianN 2y ago
  You could make it AGPL if you don’t want that.
  - kevingadd 2y ago
    Not unless all the contributors signed an Evil CLA first so I can relicense it :-)
    - adrianN 2y ago
      I start all my stuff with AGPL .
      - vertis 2y ago
        Haha jokes on you. I sucked your AGPL code into my LLM and now you have to prove I'm actually using your code when it generates the same thing. Good luck with that.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

shkkmo 2y ago

So the TLDR; is don't trust any corporate open source that requires a CLA and don't contribute to those projects unless you are prepared to fork if the rug gets pulled.

TheRealPomax 2y ago
Any project with a CLA was already subject to that stipulation. You get to do work for a company for free with the added benefit that you're now also on the hook for any legal problems that might arise from the code you contributed. What a deal, you get to put in the time and effort AND potentially fight a legal battle when a patent troll decides to go "wouldn't it be fun if" all on your own!

iforgotpassword 2y ago

> By working on a project with a CLA, where you sign away your code, you're giving carte blanche for the company to take away your freedom to use their software. Ok it's been a while so I don't remember the details or how it played out, but when Linux introduced a CoC, there were people who contributed to the kernel in the past that threatened to withdraw their code from the kernel, which would've been a nightmare to handle and clean up. How much power does a contributor have if my project is using a standard licence like GPL or BSD? Does the contributor hold any copyright over their code? Im not talking about rug pulls here, let's just say the contributor gets really mad at me for some reason.

goku12 2y ago
I think that the developer can demand a withdrawal of their contribution, though I don't know what happens to the code that's already published under a FOSS license. Regardless, many projects including the Linux kernel require the developer to sign off their contributions under the terms of the 'developer certificate of origin' [1]. While the developer retains the copyright to the contribution under DCO, they acknowledge that it will be distributed in perpetuity under the original license. So, retracting the contribution may not be an option. [1] https://developercertificate.org/ https://developercertificate.org/
- Macha 2y ago
  The main purpose of a DCO is to take the portion of a CLA that guarantees the developer actually has a right to license the code under the project's license, as it's something that some users worry about using the software without. Basically so if someone copies some code from one of the Windows leaks into Linux and Microsoft comes to sue the Linux Foundation over it, they can point to it and say "we had legal sign off they had the right to license this code, please sue them instead". In terms of irrevocability, the DCO is not that different from most open source licenses who themselves claim to be perpetual. The arguments for exceptions to that being true all either apply to e.g. both the GPL and the DCO, or to neither. Generally the consensus is that an irrevocable license grant means irrevocable, though there are some concerns about examples set by e.g. the precedent that lets artists claw back rights from record labels after 30 years.

Cheer2171 2y ago

"Corporate Open Source" is many things. Look at how many companies are paying for membership on the Linux Foundation Board: Platinum costs $500k a year, gold is $100k a year, and silver is $5-20k based on size: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

1oooqooq 2y ago
Linux foundation was never about Linux or open source. quite the contrary. the foundation started as a way for companies to band Against gpl. and they won the day Linus have up and allowed tainted kernel be the default and every device distributor moved their proprietary code to modules and rejoiced. their focus then was on gpl3 fud because google et al have much more money than modem vendors.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  Unfortunately true. I like to call the Linux foundation the megacorporations LUG (Linux user group). They want to use Linux alright, but they would prefer to do with it whatever they want, so they are not really friends of the GPL and a few other things.
- calibas 2y ago
  The resistance to GPL isn't just companies, I think you'll find the average programmer prefers using libraries licensed under MIT when given the choice. It seems like there's a kind of political ideology over what "open source" even means and how it should be practiced.There's a school of thought that says we should switch everything over to viral copyleft licenses. This will "protect" the code and ensure all derivative work is always open source. Then there's others, like myself, who believe if you want something that's truly "free and open" it should come with as few conditions as possible.
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    What about LGPL? It used to be everywhere when people were using SourceForge - but post-GitHub it seems to have dropped-off in popularity. When libs are distributed as binaries (.NET, Java, etc) it feels LGPL vs MIT/Apache is moot as hardly anyone actually modifies libraries, it seems. I wonder how different it is for Go and C/C++…

NuSkooler 2y ago

TL;DR: Once again, capitalism takes it's toll.

matheusmoreira 2y ago

Always remember: It's either AGPLv3 or proprietary all rights reserved. Anything else means you're giving your labor away for free to the beggar barons. Biggest wealth transfer in history, from developers and straight into the pockets of billionaires. It's just irrational. Also remember: Whoever owns the copyright gets to do whatever they want. The licensing security of free software, defined here as the likelihood of free software remaining free software, is proportional to the number of copyright owners involved. Changing the license requires agreement between all copyright holders, once a sizeable number of them has built up it becomes all but impossible. Therefore, anyone who asks you to assign your copyright to them should be viewed with suspicion. A true proponent of free software would want to maximize the number of copyright holders involved, not centralize the copyrights under a single entity.

busterarm 2y ago
Maybe I like writing software that I don't bother to monetize but allows anyone who wants to come along and use it to eat to do so. Don't give things away if you care about what happens to them afterwards. So many people completely misunderstand what open source is about.
- matheusmoreira 2y ago
  > Don't give things away That's exactly the point I was making. My whole point was: DO NOT just give things away. That's just irrational. It brings you no profit and doesn't actually create long lasting wealth and freedom in the form of copyleft software. All it does is enable your exploitation. All it does is enrich billionaire corporations who are free to take the work of others, use it to make a killing and then laugh all the way to the bank at the suckers who made it all possible for free. Don't just give your code away for free. Either make it proprietary all rights reserved, or make it AGPLv3. Those are the two choices. Maximum profit or maximum freedom. Either they pay you lots of money, or they adhere to the full set of conditions spelled out by the AGPLv3. Don't just give your stuff away. Attach lots of strings to it. Strings that force others to benefit you in return for your generosity. Either by paying you lots of money or by being equally generous to you in return. Don't just give software away. That was the point. There is exactly one scenario where "permissive" licensing makes sense: a world without copyright. In other words, a world without licensing at all. They can copy your software and you can copy theirs. Until such a day comes that copyright is abolished though, "permissive" licensing is just nonsense, it just gives away all your leverage.

stuff4ben 2y ago

I don't blame the big corps like IBM (disclaimer: I work there, I don't speak for them) and Microsoft and Google. I really blame investors who are looking to get their money back. When they force an IPO but there's no business model to sustain the company, this is what happens. CEOs resort to developer-hostile actions which kills off the community and generates ill-will towards the company. People here shit on "lifestyle companies" but IMO that's the best model for sustainablility and developer communities (if that's what you're into).

Ekaros 2y ago
If you offer something for free. And it becomes popular partly because it is free. Well it should be pretty clear that there is not huge money in free product... And at some level someone packaging with some margin your free product is well...

ergonaught 2y ago

Products aren't projects, which has confused people for decades. If open source products retreating from some of the "freedom" elements bothers you, then you should be focusing your ire on the megacorporations and overfunded startups who simply refuse to contribute to the financial viability of the products that sustain them. For some reason "we" celebrate the exploitative, though, so I guess that's out.

nrawe 2y ago
Yep. The author complains that there used to be plucky startups with Open Core business models who've now gone "extinct", while simultaneously sharpening their pitchforks because those same companies got successful and _slightly_ amended their licenses to prevent loosing revenue against IaaS giants so that they can, in turn, continue innovating. I guess money grows on trees where they live.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  The projects I think of most are redis and ansible—both of which I've used extensively, and quickly went from 'neat thing I spotted on Hacker News' to 'now it's a startup', then a few years later 'it's just another corporation, the open source project is buried somewhere deep inside'. The projects weren't as much open core as they were literal open source projects made to solve some problem the author had with other existing tooling. The open core part was injected when the startup decided it had to turn into a platform to sustain the beefy staffing budgets while they figured out how to generate revenue off something that was freely available.
  - radlad 2y ago
    You can add nginx to the list as well.
  - nemothekid 2y ago
    I'm not sure what the alternative is or what you are advocating. Antirez stopped working on Redis 4 years ago. We were lucky someone created Redis "for the love of the game". Now before you there are a couple options 1. Antirez2 pops up and works on Redis because they love working on Redis 2. Someone is incentivized, with money, to work on Redis. (1) didn't happen, so we must go with (2), and with (2) comes the problem of the actual business model that will be used to sustain (2). A. Donations/Support contracts B. Open "Core" aka I'm the only one allowed to sell this as SaaS. Method (A) has shown to be an abject failure while AWS takes your revenue. Companies have successfully chosen method (B). Either you have a method (C) in mind, or you just aren't being reasonable in asking people to work on OSS for free. You can be mad about the "rugpull", but between the choice of "rugpull" and abandon the project, I don't see how "rugpull" is the worse option

renewiltord 2y ago

If you can't capture sufficient value, you're not going to be able to make a business around it. The problem isn't value creation, which the OSS model does do. The problem is value capture. That's why so many people go around saying "We need to pay X more". That's a sign that creation and capture have a gap. You'll see that with traditional open-source. With companies that attempt to capture the value, your customers will always hate you unless you're careful. Of course using the Elastic license family from the beginning is one way there. The Llama license family is another way. But perhaps my favourite observed thing has to be Kong's licensing: the base thing is Apache 2.0 but when you sign a contract with them, they'll give you access to the Enterprise plugins and you can edit their source. I loved working with them. They seem to have done a good job with value capture. I think they're leaving a lot on the table, but there is significant path dependence on what they've done, so they don't have the option any more. But good job.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

buildfocus 2y ago

There are uses for CLAs besides rug pulls. For example, if you want to offer software as AGPL, accept community contributions, but be able to _also_ offer a non-AGPL option to paying customers (who effectively pay to be allowed to integrate the license without themselves being subject to licensing risk). Quite a few big orgs have a full ban on internal use of AGPL software so this can be very valuable. That requires a CLA (as I understand it, IANAL) because you're relicensing a contributor's contribution. At the same time though, I wouldn't consider it a rugpull - contributors lose nothing here, and the open source project gains a funding mechanism (a rare thing in open source).

cogman10 2y ago
Funnily, one of the best places for this in practice (IMO) is microsoft. Who is now, again funnily enough, GPLing a lot of their software but have CLAs so they can do long term support for people that want to pay for it. Latest versions stay fully open source while back ported fixes are a paid feature if you don't keep your software up to date. That, to me, is a win win. Oracle is doing the same with the JDK.
- jabl 2y ago
  > Funnily, one of the best places for this in practice (IMO) is microsoft. Who is now, again funnily enough, GPLing a lot of their software but have CLAs so they can do long term support for people that want to pay for it. Huh, what software is MS releasing under the GPL now?
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Not as much as I thought. MIT is more common it looks like. https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/repositories?q=license%3Agpl https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/repositories?q=license%3Ag...
    - int_19h 2y ago
      MIT is the standard OSS license for Microsoft stuff that is open source. You also see Apache for some projects that predate standardization on MIT, and GPL where there's no way to avoid it (i.e. when you have to build on code that is itself GPL). That said, peak OSS at Microsoft is already past. These days, it's all about advertising products as OSS while quietly close-sourcing parts of it (e.g. just about the only thing in VSCode that's fully open source is JS support, every other language extension is closed to some extent).

amouat 2y ago

The declining share price and profits is exactly what made it possible for IBM to buy Hashicorp. The license change didn't juice things -- it watered down the price. $6 billion is a snip compared to the $14 billion IPO valuation. Fintan Ryan has a nice write-up here: https://medium.com/@fintanr/on-ibm-acquiring-hashicorp-c9c73a40d20c https://medium.com/@fintanr/on-ibm-acquiring-hashicorp-c9c73...

TheDudeMan 2y ago

I just watched this interesting Node.js doc (Open-source Node.js was purchased by a corp and there was some drama along the way). https://youtu.be/LB8KwiiUGy0 https://youtu.be/LB8KwiiUGy0

deathanatos 2y ago

> And they're not even a pointless AI company! Are you sure? (/s), because IBM mentioned "AI" no less than 10 times in their announcement of the purchase: > AI-driven application growth … IBM's deep focus and investment in […] AI … The global excitement surrounding generative AI … HashiCorp's capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era … generative AI deployment continues to grow … IBM's commitment to […] AI innovation … today's AI revolution … AI-driven complexity … IBM is a leading provider of global […] AI, … IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI Thankfully the press managed to delete most of those, though there were some announcement that nonetheless took the bait.

geerlingguy 2y ago
Ah, maybe IBM was duped into thinking HashiCorp was an AI play?
- Aissen 2y ago
  Obviously, you discover and talk to AI services with consul, store AI secrets in vault, deploy AI platform nomad with AI infrastructure software terraform.

j-cheong 2y ago

I think the anger comes from the rug pull, not that they chose to be source available, right? If they chose to be source available from day 1, then no harm done?

geerlingguy 2y ago
Yep; though HashiCorp would be a much smaller company had they not started with an open source license.

Decabytes 2y ago

I'm glad Jeff pointed out the RMS article on Free software > For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software. > “Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.” > We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters. What we advocate is not “open source,” and what we oppose is not “closed source.” To make this clear, we avoid using those terms. People in the FOSS world has been beating this drum since the very beginning. Free software was always an ideology. I get that that turns people off, just like projects wrapped up in religion and politics do, but it's the only way to ensure that stuff like this doesn't happen. I concede that the people who champion FOSS are not always the kindest people to be around, see the response from people about Guix when I mentioned it as an alternative to Nix. But when I was in Boston I was a card carrying member of the FSF. I went to a few libre planets, and I met some real nice people in real life who also cared about FOSS very deeply, so I know not everyone in the community is a jerk.

downrightmike 2y ago
"What we advocate is not “open source,” and what we oppose is not “closed source.” I have zero idea what this means and I've been on Debian since Woody
- runjake 2y ago
  The GNU philosophy believes Free Software[1] and Open Source are two different things[2]. 1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html 2. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
- 2y ago

qwertox 2y ago

It's basically become market research where the amount of devs which get hooked indicate success and these devs also double as the client (a trap). I try to stay with my stack, which also makes me miss out on things like the highly recommended Tailscale-service.

Pannoniae 2y ago

None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it, and prevent others from exploiting you in the process. Hyperscalers like Amazon exploit OSS projects by reselling them as a cloud service and they earn a gigantic sum in the process. But this is not a neutral thing to do - the OSS project is still responsible for maintenance! (And in many places, the "no warranty" clause seems completely disregarded - users and corporations demand bugfixes since it's a "critical library") The most telling sentence is "Open source culture relies on trust. Trust that companies you and I helped build (even without being on the payroll) wouldn't rugpull."... where is any trust in exploiting someone's work without giving anything back? the hyperscalers routinely break the OSS social contract, but because they abide to the letter of the licences, they get a free pass and many white knights from even the OSS community and even OSI itself. A business model of "you can see the source, you can modify it but you can't offer it as a service or resell my work" is much more honest and trustworthy than the "develop a library, a cloud service picks it up then pressures you with PRs and issues until you permanently burn out from the whole thing" This is partly addressed by the post - "But you know what? I'd just prefer honesty. If revenue is so dependent on selling software, just... make the software proprietary. Don't be so coy!". This is not honesty though. Claiming that anything not party-approved.... I mean OSI-approved is not open source and it's proprietary is a very myopic thing. For users and developers, it's much more beneficial if they can see or even modify the source even if they don't have an unrestricted right to use and modify it however they want. This absolutist, black-and-white approach could potentially lead to many pieces of software becoming fully proprietary, all-rights-reserved in the future since the open source community harasses source available projects quite frequently, and not many have the patience to put up with that. And that would be a sad outcome indeed for user freedom, repairability, portability and other values RMS and the FSF dearly holds.

sangnoir 2y ago
> None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it... Should OSS solve that "problem"? Free software predates billion-dollar OSS / open-core companies, it also doesn't require the maintainer directly earn a living from it. Perhaps the era of OSS megacorps and the concomitant VC/startup dreams is setting, as these large, formerly OSS companies are rejecting OSS licenses in favor of bigger profits. To that, I say good riddance, not every useful git repository has to be incorporated. > ...and prevent others from exploiting you in the process. The whole point of free and open source software is anyone can use it and improve it - including Amazon and the person you hate. An OSS license is not a growth-hack for adoption: if you want to discourage Amazon from using your product, use AGPL. If you're worried others won't use your AGPL software, then you're growth-hacking. FL/OSS will be fine between evening/weekend hackers (xz), small-to-medium companies/consultancies (Rails), and our neo-feudal tech overlords (React).

bsnnkv 2y ago

I recently re-licensed a large open source project from MIT to a source-available license which restricts redistribution after someone decided to fork it, completely rearrange the code and introduce subtle breaking interface changes, and then package it up with basic Electron UI for sale on a platform digital store. I don't know what the answer is, but the OSI definition is clearly not built to withstand this era of late stage capitalism and the "hustle culture" that permeates through it.

8organicbits 2y ago
Trademark law should handle this (at least in some countries). Register a trademark and then send a cease and desist to the fork as they are creating confusion in the marketplace by distributing something they created using your registered name. Perhaps consider using Apache 2.0 license, section six has language that specifically addresses trademarks.
- wmf 2y ago
  A lot of open source devs are allergic to promoting their work so owning the trademark won't help them. For example, the above developer could have created their own official GUI and put it in the app store but they won't. Realistically the value is in GUIs, SaaS, marketing, etc. not in backend code.
  - bsnnkv 2y ago
    Replying to both parent comments here: I do a fair bit of promotion on YouTube[1] which has resulted in a vibrant community around the software, and I am now creating an official, free GUI[2]. In this specific case even if there had been a trademark in place, the person in question had not used the name of the project at all, but had decided to aggressively market it in community spaces. Ultimately after much reflection and experiencing first hand how easy it is for people to abuse (in my opinion) the option of deliberately hard-forking and introducing breaking changes to funnel people towards a paid piece of software (in this case, a GUI) that will _only_ work with their hard-fork, I concluded that preventing this kind of ecosystem fragmentation is more important to me than an "OSI-approved" badge. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@LGUG2Z https://www.youtube.com/@LGUG2Z [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZKjBMt4kZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZKjBMt4kZ4

8organicbits 2y ago

I started (and just published) a website[1] that tries to track relicensing risks across a number of OSS projects. The current methodology looks at trademark holders, licenses, and CLA/DCO requirements. I think there's community value in educating develpers, surfacing risks, tracking when a project changes it's posture, and promoting forks. If this sort of thing is interesting to you, I'm looking to expand the project listing with community support. I suspect the relicensing trend is on its way up. [1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/ https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/

jillesvangurp 2y ago

Most successful open source projects are actually backed by companies and most of those projects are of course alive and kicking. The entire fortune 500 runs on software and the most of that consists of massive amounts of open source with some sprinklings of proprietary stuff mixed in. Linux would have stayed a silly hobby project without the possibility for this. What's dead, or rather was never really that much alive is the notion of not quite so open source projects where a single corporate entity attempts to dictate the rules and actively discourages outside contributions, and people profiting from "their" source code. As a proportion of most widely used OSS software the amount of software and the number of developers involved with it is a rounding error. There are two main problems with corporate OSS: 1) it stifles the formation of a healthy community of outside contributors. This endangers long term success of projects. The more restrictions exist (e.g. copy right transfers or aggressively anti commercial usage licenses like AGPL), the more likely it is that would be contributors will take the hint and stay away. 2) it limits growth to the strategy, financial success, and imagination/skills of just one company. Because with projects being bottle necked on the financial success of just one company and cut of from outside help, absolutely nothing happens unless that one company pays for it. And with finances effectively supplied by VC investors interested more in IPOs and quick exits than good software, OSS is just a buzzword that goes on the investor deck and not something they actively value or appreciate. Hence legal monstrosities like BSL that make no sense whatsoever from the point of view of nurturing a healthy community of external developers. Most VC companies of course fail. That kind of is the point. And most of their restrictively licensed software projects die along with them and don't survive the implosion of these companies. Developers move onto other things and the software gets peddled to hedge-funds or companies like IBM. The only exception to this is properly licensed open source that can simply be forked. Oracle, Redis, Red Hat, Hashicorp, Elasticsearch, etc. found that out the hard way. The answer is not getting more proprietary about OSS software and preventing forks. The software gets forked precisely because these projects are too valuable to let it rot away behind corporate pay walls. This is not a failure of open source but actually a huge success. The software will long survive the misguided corporate shenanigans. The software and community will be fine. Those companies, possibly a lot less.

pjmlp 2y ago

flerchin 2y ago

Teraform and serverless doing the exact same thing at the exact same time really indicates that the market conditions that allowed for software like this was not long term sustainable. As a builder that leverages them both, I'm saddened, but I get it.

pjmlp 2y ago

What is dead is the utopian dream that making companies whose main product is raw software, is possible to do in a sustainable way, while keeping everything open source. There are bills to pay, donations only give so much, very few buy books from community members, consulting doesn't apply to all software, trainings even less, not everything can be a SaaS,...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tzs 2y ago

OT: if the author of the article sees this, there's an error in a quote. You quote HN user skywhopper as saying > HashiCorp already did a great job pre-draining all their flavor but their quote actually says [1] > HashiCorp has done a good job of pre-draining any flavor it once had [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135686

geerlingguy 2y ago
Ah sorry about that, was paraphrasing for the video, but the blog post should have the direct quote since I don't have a snapshot. I'll update the page when I'm back at my computer later!

getcrunk 2y ago

This goes against the foss ethos but given that foss is ultimately rooted in freedom I think what I will suggest can be reconciled with the primary principle. I’ve been thinking the only way to truly protect freedom of individuals and of foss development is to have a dual license which is foss unless you deploy it to over 10m users or 10m revenue or belong to list of companies like the eu designated gatekeepers. In that case each project should have the latitude to decide if they will enforce terms if any. Meaning that given the needs of the developers being otherwise met they can always forego any additional requirements

jratkevic 2y ago

What is C

penguin_booze 2y ago

> Bryan Cantrill's been sounding the alarm for years—yes, that Bryan Cantrill, the one who posted this gem The video is of Brendan Gregg, not of Bryan. Am I missing something?

nsteel 2y ago
Yes: Bryan posted the video of Brendan shouting.

throwaway984393 2y ago

[dead]

zhengiszen 2y ago

In 2024 a whole lot of ideals have been shattered... It is a wake up call for each one of us