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0 pointslifeisstillgood2y ago0 comments

Can I ask where Pulumi gets revenue from? (Honest question first time I have heard of you, quick look seems to be a CentOS for hashicorp ?)

I love the ethos of open source and have spoken at and helped run conferences, and had the pleasure of being paid to develop it - but the productivity I had when paid ten hours a day to work on OSS compared to whenever I get a chance between work family and everything else, well, it's better for everyone to get paid and release code, than not get paid and not write the code.

I see these semi-commercial licenses as the equivalent of a legal "just don't take the piss".

Would be interested in your side of the question. How do we keep on developing the code as well as keeping it open?

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paulgb2y ago

I am a paying Pulumi user. Their tool integrates with a cloud platform and we pay per resource managed by Pulumi.

Pulumi is one of several products where I like that it’s open source in case I need to move off their cloud, but hope that I don’t have to (Plausible is another).

joeduffy2y ago

[Joe, Pulumi Founder here.]

Said well (and thank you for being a customer and valuable member of our community!)

The analogy I draw sometimes is that our open source infrastructure as code SDK ("Pulumi") is like Git, and our commercial offering ("Pulumi Cloud") is like GitHub.

Like GitHub, the Pulumi Cloud offers valuable features that go beyond the open source project for teams looking to manage lots of projects securely at scale, but we definitely love our open source community and want folks to have the choice to use Pulumi however makes the most sense for them.

This approach also has the nice consequence that we can be fully transparent with our community at all times while also building a strong, long-term business. If a new feature is part of the infrastructure as code SDK, it's open source and free; if it's part of the Pulumi Cloud SaaS, it's part of our commercial offering. This avoids needing to do things like artificially hold back features (like open core) or violating our commitment to the open source community (like Hashi's new license).

sanderjd2y ago

So here's my perspective on these two competing models:

1. I can read all of the code, modify it, and self-host it for my own purposes, but the license disallows me from re-selling it.

2. I can read, modify, self-host, and commercialize a subset of the code, and the rest is an opaque SaaS.

To me, as a customer with no interest in re-selling this code, I don't see how #2 is better than #1 in any way. And I find it incredibly mystifying that I keep seeing companies ragged on here for doing #1 while the model in #2 is somehow held up as the paragon of ethical virtue or something.

Can you help me understand? Why is it better for me to be able to read less of the code I'm running?

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pcthrowaway2y ago

Is the Pulumi Individual Edition open for use by solo founders operating as a sole proprietership? I can't find anything clarifying whether it's individual (as in hobbyist, nonprofessional) or individual, as in, one person not collaborating with anyone else.

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tedivm2y ago

Plausible is amazing, I love it. I moved off of another platform that started as open source and then went closed source, but Plausible ended up being a better platform over all anyways.

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