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Comment by louzell | Hacker News Reader

I mean, businesses change? The founders didn't have a crystal ball to see how every decision would play out.

Reading through these comments, I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is".

If Hashicorp had started with this new license in the first place, do we really think they wouldn't have had the business success that they've had? We'll never know, but my guess is that a license that says "competitors can't copy us" would seem totally reasonable to folks contributing, and irrelevant to customers that have a problem to solve. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I want to understand this obviously passionate response.

(Since I've commented a couple times on this let me also say I'm not a hashicorp employee nor know anyone there)

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> I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is".

That's not just pop psychology. That's straight from "The Prince" by Machiavelli.

  “Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour 
  being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred 
  little by little, that so they may be more fully relished.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6858171-injuries-therefore-...

Nice find!

"Make sure your enemies read pop psychology"

I don't know that it's at all clear how successful Terraform would be if it started with a more restrictive license. I mean there is a reason why a lot of projects start out with a different license and only change to BSL once a certain level of popularity is achieved, right?

As a possible contributor, and with all things being equal (which, really, never happens), I'd prefer a GPL-based product to have my time over a BSD/MIT license, because I really want my work to remain free. A BSL-based product would have to be very important to me to make it worth for me to dedicate time to it.

In reality, the usefulness of the product and friendliness towards developers is much more important.

Do you think crack dealers change their mind and suddenly discover they can’t make money off free crack? Or they give it away knowing that’s how you develop a customer base.

Pretty sure crack dealers don't set things up so their work can be forked into a foundation.

Bait and switch isn’t about the literal means of production. It’s about corporation and organizational dishonesty.

It’s lame that hashicorp (and others) are fair weather open sources who start as open source to gain critical mass and then jettison their purported ideals when it benefits them.

Dishonest because they trick contributors into working toward something that they may not, I think probably wouldn’t have, chosen to work on had hashicorp been honest since the beginning.

I don't know what "literal means of production" is referring to here. Crack dealers don't generally control anything one might refer to as a "means of production"; they are more like resellers. Marxist terminology is a bit too much of a Duplo-brick description of reality to apply usefully here, or indeed in most places.

All the work done in this case can be forked into a different product, as is being done here. The reason crack dealers do what they do is they control the supply, not a "means of production". Hashicorp explicitly licenced away their control of the supply ten years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

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