Open Source businesses have no future in a world where big tech can gulp your product for free.
The OpenTofu folks will probably even raise capital to support commercialization of their thing at some point.
For my own project [1], I'm planning on keeping the basic edition open and maybe adding an enterprise edition later on under BSL – basically like MariaDB does. I think that's the most fair model you can do right now.
[1]: https://lunni.dev/, a Docker Swarm dashboard
Their stuff pretty much all competes with it.
HashiCorp couldn't compete. Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. I worked at two companies who rejected them because their pricing was so ludicrous. The TACoS space of small startups nimbly out-competed these bad offerings.
Rent-seeking because you weren't able to compete with tiny startups able to effectively value add where you didn't is a bad strategy that pisses people off. I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends.
Corporations didn't seem to understand that when you participate in the OSS ecosystem you don't just get to trade on the name recognition. Or if you do, and you renege on those promises, you're going to get a lot of people very angry.
So now we have companies going BSL because they didn't have a good business plan to begin with and this is their dying gasp to own the space so someone will pay them and not their much smarter, more creative, startup competitors.
HashiCorp pricing just made it simply impossible to pay them.
Their plan was to provide a free offering that was very good, get companies hooked, and then charge our the nose for any enterprisy feature.
The problem was how they charged, which they don't reveal until after you contact sales. You could build a solution using the free offering that works very well. Then years later want something paid offerings and contact sales and find out that they charge over 1000USD per clients, and you have 1000 clients. Oops, guess I'm just going to engineer my own solution for that. 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational.
It's really hard to go to management and say this open source thing we are running and serving the companies needs will now cost millions of dollars.
Though I understand HashiCorp position somewhat. I'm sure their sales team has repeatedly heard that a potential client has decided they don't need the feature they called about since the free solution is good enough and can engineer around any short commons.
Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp.
Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost.
At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.
Terraform is immensely valuable.
The open source bits is 90% of that value.
An enterprise will _already_ have a team managing terraform infra. Them building the parts they need from that remaining 10% may be cheaper then paying HashiCorp. This is a difficult sell.
Also, a ton of Terraform's value comes from the fact that there are modules for everything. Some or developed by HashiCorp but most are developed by vendors or even users who want terraform support.
In many places in europe you can hire a team of ~10 engineers already fully loaded for $1 million a year, or like 2 seniors and 4 midlevels or any combo like this. This is based off of 1st hand experience hiring for these salaries.
Couldn’t keep out a personal dig at Mitchell, who happens to be one of the most unproblematic people at Hashicorp and certainly doesn’t care or participate much in governance ? Seems like a lot of personal feelings were packed into this innocuous-posturing statement.
To clarify: the products themselves were and still are very good, with minor quirks.
As for pricing, there is a class of companies that set extremely high margins (this doesn't apply just to Hashicorp, see the the pricing of Gruntwork which I believe contributes to OpenTofu). This game reduces the number of customers but also the number of problems you need to deal with. This strategy is perfectly fine and I have no complaints - I built my own HA Vault cluster solution and used remote AWS backend instead of Hashicorp Cloud. But the license change was a game changer - Hashicorp is still a strong player in the market, but no longer the default choice.
I also don't particularly agree with your clarification on my part. I think their products are slim on features especially in light of what you're paying and a Terraform shop should almost always be opting for a TACoS solution over HashiCorp's.
Yes, doing money on open source is hard, but on the other hand, the reason why you were successful was because you were open source in the first place and capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors which would've neither contributed nor adopted your product otherwise.
Imho, if you can't compete with other cloud offerings of your products then your cloud offering is weak. Competing with Amazon on prices is obviously hard, but not impossible, and it's easy to compete with them on customer service because it's your goddamn product and you should have the best expertise on it.
Does this hypothesis really hold up? In my experience the contributor community remains small and often even dormant compared to the userbase of an opensource project only to take action if the project itself gets in turmoil (main developer leaves, bad takes on features etc.)
What is the ratio of terraform dev vs third party dev in most popular terraform modules?
save themselves from others building a less shit version of terraform cloud.
What I find odd in these situations, that have happened multiple times now, is the companies go straight from "weak" licenses like the MPL, straight to "source available" ones. Surely it would have been a good idea to try a strong copyleft licence like AGPL first.
“You could ask or pay for an alternate licence” or “you’re almost certainly not using this in a way that means you need to open source your entire product” and any other rational argument you can think of are just met with “yeah but agpl” and that’s apparently just the end of it.
If it's to bait in companies to use your product and then offer more features under a proprietary license, then something that's more attractive to companies like a permissive (corporate charity) license is a better choice. If it's to ensure that everyone who uses the software can contribute to the development, something like the GPL or AGPL is better.
There can be other reasons to pick a corporate charity license, of course, but encouraging corporations to use your software is certainly one of the most common.
Developers are so entitled, they don't even ever reflect they are taking without giving back all the time.
It's a win/win/win, open source projects will still support it, so you don't get the backlash from the community, while those who just want to take will either pay or find a different project.
With BSL and similar, you end up looking like the "bad guy", and the forkers look like the "good guys". With AGPL you will still look like the open source "good guy", and if someone makes a fork they look like money grabbing assholes.
I assume there may be forks of the older code but I don’t actually know.