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Comment by password4321 | Hacker News Reader

Is there any one individual or group responsible for HashiCorp's switch to BSL?

From what I saw Mitchell let go of running the company and now that HashiCorp is not so cool anymore it's time to get out.

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They built a ton of value, were unable to capitalize on it (just like early Docker), and when they tried to capture the value of the thing they built it pissed off the open source ecosystem (and all the profitable companies) built on top.

They should have thought about this a long, long time ago.

I feel for the smaller companies, but I feel for big companies that come in and plunder because of open license terms.

I recently concocted a (conspiracy) theory that relicensing of HC projects is a ploy to get IBM (or some other company happy to rain on IBM's parade) to finally make an offer. Mitchell leaving the company features in the theory as well. Basically it seems like since at least 2021 HC leadership and/or investors are exploring exit strategies that will bring in the beeeelions.

That tracks. IBM acquiring Hashicorp was a persistent rumor I heard during my last year at IBM (timing was not long after the Red Hat acquisition).

Hashicorp is a public company so the theory doesn't make much sense to me. The execs and early investors already made their money.

They've been for sale since pre-IPO. Cisco almost bought them.

The thing is, Terraform Cloud could've been good, but it's not. And now it prices a K8S cluster the same as a DNS record. (and both too high for glorified object storage)

And Vault Enterprise could've been something I can justify to my EM to to ensure it continues to exist (and get namespaces and slow support as a bonus). But they asked way too much.

It also doesn't help they started prioritizing bugs almost solely based on support contracts, even trivial fixes you submit don't get merged for months to years.

They built products and thought everything else would just fall into place. And unfortunately it doesn't.

I've never personally used paid Vault but what you said, that they "asked way too much" is the constant refrain I've heard about it. Much like Splunk, it seems like there's an extra zero on the quote for smaller use cases.

Employees gotta eat, I don't begrudge them trying to sell the software. But it seems like they went for the Lamborghini business model when maybe what the market was looking for was Honda.

> Is there any one individual or group responsible for HashiCorps switch to BSL?

IBM, would you choose to trust statements[1] posted from a throwaway account

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579504

Clicking "parent" on this post a couple times yields some more context. Seems like the claim the throwaway account is making is that IBM pulling Vault into their IBM Cloud offering was the catalyst for relicensing everything. Terraform and other Hashi projects just got caught up in a blanket policy change.

Had not heard the IBM angle before and spent a few minutes digging.

This is totally non-credible. Their enterprise pricing was crazy for value and the feature-set slim. I personally was on a number of teams that refused to pay it and went with another player in the TACOS (Terraform Automation and COllaboration Software) family.

The TACOS provided way more features at a sane price point. They were out-competed by their own cottage industry and the BSL was their weapon to solve it. Surprise, surprise it backfired.

I respect Mitchell for the competent programmer he is but as a founder, he should have stepped in and done something to right the ship before it got this bad.

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