> capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors
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.)
Re:OpenTF renames itself to OpenTofu
by prmoustache on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @09:41AM
(#37583995)
In the case of terraform the main interesting bit is not terraform itself but the modules.
What is the ratio of terraform dev vs third party dev in most popular terraform modules?
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.