I see it more as both sides taking calculated risk. Developers contributing to a corporate-led OSS project with particular licensing should know that they can be rug-pulled at any time. They benefit during the project and afterwards from a good fork that otherwise wouldn't exist (a healthy fork taking shape or not is additional risk). OpenTofu is a great win for the community.
For the company the risk is that the stronger community they build, the higher the chances of a serious backlash when they rug pull. Weigh the reputation damage, and upon emergence of a good fork having a serious competitor, to the benefits of community contributions.
Don't want to be rug pulled? Choose community-led projects with good governance and copyleft licensing to contribute to.
Where's this same vitriol directed at Amazon, Google, et al.?
They've built huge cloud platforms on the backs of open source. These are highly profitable machines that siphon up so much free labor and give very little back. Instead we attack HashiCorp, whose entire product is going to fall into disuse over a fork of the very thing they built. Why is that?
I'm angry at AWS - it's literally just open source software run at scale. None of the infra and software behind AWS is open, though, so Amazon gets to lord over all of it and soak up all of the benefits.
I see it hard to attack smaller companies when the giant is in the corner taxing all of us and making fat margins.
Small companies struggle. Big companies have all the advantages, and we're giving them a pass.
If Meta announced that every company hosting a React website needed to pay them a licensing fee starting next month or shut it down, they would (rightfully) get vitriol for it. That is what this is equivalent to, not big companies using open source projects. HashiCorp is free to use whatever open source they want, including in proprietary products (that's the entire point of open source). It's the rug pull and blindsiding of the community that is the problem.
HashiCorp is seeking a monopoly on hosting Terraform, which is bad for me as a user if I think another vendor might do a better job (or even just to keep prices in line with costs). It would have been better if they had been paid for writing Terraform and now hosting services could compete on their own merits.
Big Tech throws free stuff people all the time and they usually being the one winning product / lib everybody is using. People just started to expect the same thing from all companies no matter the size and profitability. It's madness.
reactordev|2 years ago
MenhirMike|2 years ago
rapnie|2 years ago
For the company the risk is that the stronger community they build, the higher the chances of a serious backlash when they rug pull. Weigh the reputation damage, and upon emergence of a good fork having a serious competitor, to the benefits of community contributions.
Don't want to be rug pulled? Choose community-led projects with good governance and copyleft licensing to contribute to.
echelon|2 years ago
They've built huge cloud platforms on the backs of open source. These are highly profitable machines that siphon up so much free labor and give very little back. Instead we attack HashiCorp, whose entire product is going to fall into disuse over a fork of the very thing they built. Why is that?
I'm angry at AWS - it's literally just open source software run at scale. None of the infra and software behind AWS is open, though, so Amazon gets to lord over all of it and soak up all of the benefits.
I see it hard to attack smaller companies when the giant is in the corner taxing all of us and making fat margins.
Small companies struggle. Big companies have all the advantages, and we're giving them a pass.
Ugh. I don't get this.
paxys|2 years ago
erik_seaberg|2 years ago
mathverse|2 years ago
unethical_ban|2 years ago