In reality, the usefulness of the product and friendliness towards developers is much more important.
It’s lame that hashicorp (and others) are fair weather open sources who start as open source to gain critical mass and then jettison their purported ideals when it benefits them.
Dishonest because they trick contributors into working toward something that they may not, I think probably wouldn’t have, chosen to work on had hashicorp been honest since the beginning.
All the work done in this case can be forked into a different product, as is being done here. The reason crack dealers do what they do is they control the supply, not a "means of production". Hashicorp explicitly licenced away their control of the supply ten years ago.
That's not just pop psychology. That's straight from "The Prince" by Machiavelli.
“Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour
being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred
little by little, that so they may be more fully relished.”
Reading through these comments, I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is".
If Hashicorp had started with this new license in the first place, do we really think they wouldn't have had the business success that they've had? We'll never know, but my guess is that a license that says "competitors can't copy us" would seem totally reasonable to folks contributing, and irrelevant to customers that have a problem to solve. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I want to understand this obviously passionate response.
(Since I've commented a couple times on this let me also say I'm not a hashicorp employee nor know anyone there)