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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

I'm not Hashicorp, but I mean look at Docker. They built the most valuable devops tool of the last generation and can barely muster a viable business. Why would Hashicorp give the slightest worry to losing thousands and thousands of non-paying customers? The upside is lots of money and the downside is loss of halo. Honestly, it's an unfortunate game of expectation setting. 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.

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  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.

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 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.

> They built the most valuable devops tool of the last generation

'They' as in Docker Inc.? They made it accessible for the masses, which counts for a lot, but they built on a lot of pre-existing Linux kernel tech that other people who envisioned containers put in place before Docker came in and seized on the opportunity.

> can barely muster a viable business.

They perused what proved to be the wrong business model until 2019, nowdays they're more than 'barely' viable.

> 'They' as in Docker Inc.? They made it accessible for the masses, which counts for a lot, but they built on a lot of pre-existing Linux kernel tech that other people who envisioned containers put in place before Docker came in and seized on the opportunity.

100%. Docker's UX has always been its killer feature, and it counts for a lot. That's a very real contribution. But this is absolutely still a 'shoulders of giants', 'it takes a village' situation.

It is all about the change. HashiCorp model was open source, and now is not. Salesforce has never been open source.

Would terraform have been as popular it if had never been open source? That we won't know, but we can guess.

Hello Juan!

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

The photoshop effect*. That is to say, devs that are familiar with it will push their workplaces, because it's a pain to pick up yet another tool when you know one that will work.

*A largely hypothesized reason photoshop was so easy to crack back in the day, was that Adobe knew that if kids grew up using photoshop, businesses wouldn't be willing to spend the money re-training their employees, and would just buy a photoshop license.

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