Open source forkers stick an OpenBao in the oven

The rebellion against HashiCorp for adopting a competition-limiting license for its Terraform software expanded this week, with word that The Linux Foundation aims to help hatch an open source alternative to Vault, the company's secrets management project. At the Open Source Summit in Tokyo, Japan, this week, Sebastian Stadil …

[David Newall]

Bait and switch

I sympathize with a business who develops software and releases it as open source, only to later find other businesses undercutting them with their own software. But I think they must have known that was a likely outcome, and the idea that they could lock customers into a new, proprietary deal after hooking them on freedom is just wrong. Although Red Hat have switched to the, well, grey side if not actually dark, I think their remarkable and well deserved success proves that you can develop free software on the back of customer support.

[Grogan]

Re: Bait and switch

My sympathy ends at their choice of open source licenses, that allow companies to do that to them.

[Missing Semicolon]

This will kill big Open-Source products

This is one of those "this is why we can't have nice things" situations.

If it's not possible to monetize the software in some way, these OS startups won't exist, as there's no route to revenue. Support as a business model only works if the value of the support is high (as with RedHat, as Linux is just too huge to set up a bespoke support organisation for). The big Cloud flingers have worked out that they don't need support for the smaller stuff, and can fix the product in-house, whilst flogging the software-as-a-service. And, frankly, I expect that AWS are going to be better at it than Hashicorp, for example.

When forking and open-sourcing as the default answer to a license change, it tells the investor community that new open-source projects are simply uninvestable.

[Grogan]

Re: This will kill big Open-Source products

That's the whole point of open source software...if someone changes the license and you don't like it, you still have the previous licensed code to work with. (read... fork). Historically, they should know that.

Companies and their greed choose licenses where they don't have to give anything back. Well guess what? The same freedoms are afforded to everyone else. Use an appropriate GNU license, like Affero for shit like this. They can use your code, but they can't lock it up, and you are entitled to their extensions of it to put back into YOUR software.