HashiCorp CEO called their community building for Terraform “Malicious” [video] | Hacker News Reader

HashiCorp CEO called their community building for Terraform “Malicious” [video]

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45 pointsvmatsiiako9 comments

Wow, I assumed he must have misspoke. But he actually said this twice and really underlined it the second time, saying "it's very malicious is the right word".

What a terrible way to communicate about your company strategy, regardless of the audience.

Yeah, I had the same reaction. It's hard to understand what he's actually trying to say (I watched it a couple of times), but my best guess is that he thinks "malicious" means something else. EDIT: reading the other comments, I think he meant something more like "subversive." Not sure, but maybe.

Mitchell's been out for a while now, and overall it seems like Hashicorp is enshittifying right on the expected schedule. However, with regard to this particular video, I think the guy just misspoke or got confused.

A non-technical VP of Marketing businessman led an open source tech company into this situation? shocked pikachu face

Here is the link to the right segment: https://youtu.be/59rEiAyYEVk?si=kQrCA6X8cMmKsq4q&t=1110

For four years I listened to Dave (CEO) talk while at HC, and while he could easily go on at length, there was a decent amount of word salad too. All of the “did he really mean…???” comments here are like straight of Slack during an all hands. When I first watched this video my brain immediately translated “malicious” into devious or clever or something like that.

I guess only he knows what he really meant, but IMO internally we’d have been pretty WTF?? if the intended characterization was really “malicious”.

well, the title is really out of context, afaict (not a native speaker). I think he means they built a community by playing the big cloud platforms against each other (e.g. tell microsoft that they should advertise terraform so their users can more easily switch to azure, tell the same to amazon, google, oracle, etc). Sure, he says malicious, and it seems to be a bit forced, but for me the HN title really oversells it.

The other aspect is that this is 4 months old and not really relevant for the current debate regarding the license changes (which it seemed to aim at, when first reading the title).

He explicitly says that malicious is the right word and it's not the playing of cloud providers off one another, it was the virality play.

He says, "if you want to be a part of JP Morgan's cloud program then you need to write a terraform provider."

As far as "malicious" goes, this is like paying with an expired coupon for your discounted lunch. I've seen 100x worse in businesses like social apps. The guy seems kind of insecure by overexaggerating the maliciousness aspect of it. I'd say he's being too hard on himself for following what's ultimately standard business tactics.

It's too bad you're being downvoted, because you are more right than wrong. My listening of it is the same as yours. he wasn't calling the practice malicious towards the community itself; in fact it's SOP. he clearly (?) meant it was malicious (his own self-amused take on it, not "evil" malicious) towards the 4 targets that mattered. the success as a product required such "maliciousness" towards those 4 targets. not too unlike states in the USA needing to individually legalize marijuana before it would be considered at all federally.

I do find the HN title truthy. I think I did read into the title what the author was intending, ie to be clickbaity what with the new licensing.

where you're wrong is saying that this being 4 months old isn't relevant to the license change. he/hashicorp didn't suddenly come up with the new license 2 weeks ago and then made it happen. it's something you think about for awhile, certainly at least over 2 quarters of missed growth for your own cloud product. so what he said in public 4 months ago is very relevant.

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