I had Hashicorp in my mind as a cool and respectful company. These recent events have made to reconsider and throw them into the same bag as Oracle. I find this pretty sad.
It actually was a respectable company. But the guy who started it all (Mitchell Hashimoto) isn't there anymore (at least not as a decision maker) so the corporate drones are taking over.
It's sad too, mitchellh used to be fairly active in the HN community but it seems he is not able to for likely professional reasons after the BSL fiasco.
Remember, he was CEO but didn't like that role. He stepped down from the CEO role as well as the board so he could continue to hack rather than lead. I agree, its likely not how he wants things to be run but its not his decision anymore.
Nonsense? Now that the company is public we can see the issue. They are losing a ton of money. This isn't about quarterly projections, it's about keeping the company afloat.
The license change is only for future changes. The existing codebase cannot be relicensed as HC does not own full copyright on 100% of contributions AIUI.
IANAL, but I don't think anyone can change license of something that has already been published. Doing so would defeat the purpose of having a license, in the first place.
They absolutely were at one point, this is why the BSL move was so upsetting, not because it necessarily stopped people from using it (unless they of course were offering competing services), but because it signaled that the phase of HashiCorp being a cool and respectful company are over.
It's almost a capitalist gut punch. Chasing that dollar, companies will squeeze every last drop of altruism out of a company.
It makes me think that the gov. should provide incentives to keep open source software backed by corporations going by figuring out how to offer a tax break on all of the "lost revenue"... We just need a good way of figuring out what the lost revenue is.
