“HashiCorp’s technology was critical to the modern cloud”
I would challenge that. Their tech gained a stronghold because it had a liberal OSS license and thus a community formed around it.
Their technology itself isn’t critical, it was just popular to such a degree that it was almost standard in a lot of settings.
Now they’ve upset that community we see they’re not as critical as they think they are - OpenTofu exists and people are shunning Vault and the rest of their offerings.
If I was starting a software business today I simply wouldn’t open source on day one. I might lose some of the crowd that only uses OSS but I’d just have to focus on others for a while.
> If I was starting a software business today I simply wouldn’t open source on day one. I might lose some of the crowd that only uses OSS but I’d just have to focus on others for a while.
Or you could use GPL3 (for client-side) or AGPL (if it could be hosted). OSS crowd will be still happy and "leechers" are prevented.
It usually comes with an option: those that don't like AGPL can still get a non-AGPL licensed version for a fee. You would be still better off than with totally closed source.
The fact that a community-run fork is causing them to sweat so much shows that HashiCorp themselves may not be as essential to the Terraform ecosystem as they thought.
I would challenge that. Their tech gained a stronghold because it had a liberal OSS license and thus a community formed around it.
Their technology itself isn’t critical, it was just popular to such a degree that it was almost standard in a lot of settings.
Now they’ve upset that community we see they’re not as critical as they think they are - OpenTofu exists and people are shunning Vault and the rest of their offerings.
If I was starting a software business today I simply wouldn’t open source on day one. I might lose some of the crowd that only uses OSS but I’d just have to focus on others for a while.