...quoted from the co-founders of a closed-source company running previously open-source software. Pot calling the kettle black. Their company wouldn't exist either, this is a ridiculous statement.
Quite possibly a very fair point. I don't use Terraform or Spacelift or care at all about these particular companies. I DO care about open source, and I care about BSLs and CLAs and the dilution of what open source actually means. Legal or not, it feels like bait and switch. The CLAs supposedly make it legal. They have no place in truly open source projects unless at most it is to say a license is granted to the project in perpetuity under the same license as the project is licensed at the time of the PR.
If small infrastructure companies don't do this, companies like Amazon get to suck all of the air out of the room. They reap the profits and directly compete with the company doing all the work. At scale.
This is the same for database companies like Redis and Elastic.
Open source has become a weapon used by the giants. This isn't about OSS anymore. It's about the largest companies in our industry setting compensation and soaking up all the profits.
I'd say an IC at one of these companies deserves more than an IC at Amazon and should see outsized reward. But that's not what's happening.
I get that there are pros and cons of different licenses, and reasonable people my disagree, but this is the first time that occurred to them? This far down the road?
No one forced them to be open source. They did it for certain benefits. They would have gone nowhere in the early days with this new license, most likely. I can only see these moves as bait and switch. Encourage everyone to use it, allow and maybe even encourage companies to build offerings on top of it to help with traction/mindshare... and then oh btw we changed our mind. It may be their right, but I'm glad people are talking about the implications.
They likely did anticipate it, but not how ferociously some of the cloud providers would pursue the strategy.
The Amazons of the world don't have to pay a fair price for the software that they use and also get to sell at exceptionally high prices.
TBH, that last part is still somewhat of a mystery to me. How did the market evolve to such a place that large infrastructure providers can command huge gross margins? Shouldn't that be a highly commoditized part of the supply chain?
It’s because people misunderstand the way that companies buy software and purchase things. The social layer of “nobody ever gets fired for buying X” is what drives adoption. Companies like AWS sell risk management first, then software capabilities.
Not many companies are “big enough to sue” at a scale that you can roll your entire brand or operation onto and know it won’t be acquired or “private equitied” tomorrow, and so it consolidates down to the major players.
Those are the factors that count for enterprise buyers.
AWS can roll out an open source tool and get massive adoption because it’s rolling out an insured product, essentially. They often even have issues or less capabilities, but it comes with support and a assumption guarantee of general availability and so aggregates and reduces the risk for large buyers.
Yeah, that's fair, but there really should be a lot of companies that fit that criteria. There are a lot of large companies that offer hosting, but there seems to be little price competition and most are not signup-friendly in the way that AWS, GCP, and Azure are.
I hear this a lot but I'm still not convinced it's true. Iirc Redis still takes 20 minutes to provision on both Azure and AWS (unless they optimized it in the last couple years) and doesn't provide much value. The creator of the software should be in a much better position to offer a rich product experience than a 3rd party can.
Elastic is even more interesting here. There are plenty of anecdotes about Elastic purchasing being complicated and confusing. In addition, for the first few years of existence, AWS Elastic was missing some basic features (afaik you couldn't scale your cluster or something similar). In fact, AWS is now maintaining their own fork of Elasticsearch.
Spacelift co-founder here. To some extent I understand where you're coming from, but there are important points to make here.
Terraform itself is not a product (Terraform Cloud is), it's a language, similar to Go with which it's built. Building on top of a language does not imply the necessity of contributing to the language itself. In fact, it was very hard to contribute to hashicorp/terraform because PRs were not getting accepted, not even reviewed, just closed by a bot.
I believe both us and our competitors contributed to the ecosystem and the community by building providers, modules, tools (like env0's excellent Terratag), reproducing and reporting bugs, or evangelizing best practices.
The way I see this move is as if Go was still owned by Google and one day Google decided it would change its license to ban any companies building anything that Google calls competitive from using the language.
Not only that, but this company is profiting off of HashiCorp's work and is complaining that they can no longer do so.
The worst part is the gentle giants such as Amazon can completely abuse HashiCorp's open source license and pull all the customers to AWS internal products, leaving HashiCorp out in the cold.
If a company of hundreds of individual can't outclass a few teams building an entirely different product, they should reevaluate their business strategy. The OSL isn't the problem, it's that the cloud offering doesn't provide enough utility.
