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0 pointsi_am_jl2y ago0 comments

  Why would Hashicorp give the slightest worry to losing thousands and thousands of non-paying customers?

Because it goes hand in hand with losing hundreds of unpaid developers, testers, bug-reporters and evangelists.

  If I wrote an open letter decrying Salesforce for not open sourcing their codebase, nobody would take me seriously. But we expect better from Hashicorp for some reason.

Because the community contributed to the codebase. Salesforce was never open source, Terraform was and took community contributions, that's the reason we have different expectations.

  [Docker] can barely muster a viable business

Docker split their development and enterprise offerings into two companies years ago and both are making money.

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smarx0072y ago

I think that once you have more than X customers, you don't really need OSS testers and bug-reporters that much – your customers will be the first ones to file a ticket if anything is wrong. And as we saw with CentOS Stream, OSS users are not generally keen to be beta-testers.

Ditto for earnings: once your company is publicly traded or at least lands in a Gartner report, you don't need evangelists that badly anymore.

Free pull requests are always welcome, but I guess a calculation was made in this case.

i_am_jlOP2y ago

>I think that once you have more than X customers, you don't really need OSS testers and bug-reporters that much – your customers will be the first ones to file a ticket if anything is wrong. And as we saw with CentOS Stream, OSS users are not generally keen to be beta-testers.

In this case the customers they're losing (as well as the devs, testers, reporters, etc) aren't end users but companies who have built software offerings on top of Terraform. That's the class of user principally impacted by the change to the license. OSS users aren't stoked about testing, but developers who build on top of Terraform in order to eat will submit bug reports and PRs all day.

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