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Comment by arccy | Hacker News Reader

only a problem if you need to update

This hasn't been my experience. After another VC-backed software switched licenses, we continued using an older, open source version licensed Apache 2. But that didn't stop their lawyers from trying to shake us down, claiming we were using the latest, enterprise version. We just showed up in their telemetry as using their product and they came a knockin. I imagine that their telemetry failed to distinguish who was running old FOSS from the latest proprietary one.

We showed our lawyers that we were using the FOSS version. But, they didn't care and demanded we remove their product (despite being FOSS) immediately on all our systems.

That was a crazy crazy week.

You can say that's a problem with our lawyers. But still, who wants to go to court even if you know that you'll win eventually? It's expensive and incredibly annoying as an engineer to have to deal with lawyers.

even then you've had five years notice that enshittification was coming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB#History

Making $10M ARR companies pay for the software that they use is not enshittification.

i mean, yes? it is? software you can't use without someone else's permission is obviously shittier than open-source software you can fork, even if you're a big company. perhaps especially if you're a big company. and software that sends telemetry to the vendor is obviously shittier than software that doesn't

i mean, no? it isn't? changing the license doesn't change the software? the software still works the same way?

In this case, they cancelled a product (core) and replaced it with a different product that has an additional new license (enterprise edition with a free tier)

So not just a license change

Well if the company can build a business then you can get great software to use... while in theory it would be great if a bunch of incredible software were done purely in the spirit of community open source, in practice that's pretty limited

$10M ARR doesn't mean anything. You could still be a tiny company with terrible financials by selling your product at a loss (a startup)

It's just an arbitrary number

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