[mfer]

Looking at the public data [1], Hashicorp looses money every quarter. At some point they need to stop burning cash because they have yet to figure out how to run a sustainable business.

I don't know enough about their operations to have good suggestions on how to become sustainable. But, I don't like this move. There are many sustainable open source companies. Moving to source available from open source will likely never be a move I like.

[1] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/HCP:NASDAQ

[PoachedEggs]

> There are many sustainable open source companies.

What are some examples?

[pcthrowaway]

SUSE, Canonical, Prisma (though their dashboard is closed source), Gitlab, pretty much every crypto company in the blockchain/web3 space.

And Hashicorp + Red Hat managed to make it work as open source companies for >10 years also

There are many more "open core" companies, like TimescaleDB, Docker, etc, who then sell proprietary services on top of the open source software

[oblio]

> SUSE, Canonical, Prisma (though their dashboard is closed source), Gitlab, pretty much every crypto company in the blockchain/web3 space.

SUSE is a niche player that was bought out in various forms a number of times.

Canonical is largely a billionaire's toy and hasn't published financial numbers in half a decade. They were losing money last time I looked at them.

Don't know Prisma.

Gitlab is losing money.

For the crypto companies, let's hold off on any of that in terms of "sustainability".

Look at the top 20 software companies. How many of them have open source their core product, their main revenue source?

[pxc]

> Gitlab is losing money.

GitLab (Enterprise) is also proprietary software.

[sebastianz]

Why do you think "open core", which most of those are, is somehow better than BSL?

> pretty much every crypto company in the blockchain/web3 space

The entire "space" has yet to prove to be sustainable. Most of these are hype-driven borderline scams, I would not list them in a _sustainable open source business_ context :)

[pcthrowaway]

> Why do you think "open core", which most of those are, is somehow better than BSL?

Firstly, I don't have a problem with BSL. I do think in general it's a bit of a slap in the face to build a business on the backs of volunteer contributors, and then close-source all your codebases which are comprised of their work.

Sure, when people contributed, they signed a CLA which gives Hashicorp the right to relicense the work (which has legitimate uses outside of killing open source, such as giving them the ability to make that software available under other terms in addition to their open source offering)

But when as little as a year ago they promised "We remain committed that the core of our technology will always remain open source." (https://web.archive.org/web/20220703202305/https://www.hashi...)

it gives whiplash to the people who contributed based on that promise.

Actually, I don't even know if this is legal, but even if it is, it's a huge violation of the trust of outside contributors to their software products.

> The entire "space" has yet to prove to be sustainable.

I agree that it's unproven, but this downturn has made apparent that so are the majority of software companies which have not IPOed and shown a sustained profit for 5+ years.

I'd give Uniswap pretty good odds of outliving the majority of YC startups.

[sebastianz]

> I'd give Uniswap pretty good odds of outliving the majority of YC startups.

The majority of YC startups are definitely not sustainable.

Probably even most of the successful ones are not sustainable, they make empty sustainability promises hoping to get bought by <BIGCORP> and end up on "our amazing journey" lists.

[sebastianz]

Sorry for veering off-topic there. I agree that re-licensing and BSL/AGPL are muddy-territory and I'm also not sure how to feel about them.

But a surviving project moving to BSL is still clearly better then the company going under and the project ending in limbo.

Even with BSL you can still access the code, audit it, learn from it, fork it to keep your own patches on top and keep up with upstream, etc. Huge value compared to closed source.

[re-thc]

Prisma isn't making money.

> And Hashicorp managed to make it work as open source companies for >10 years also

You mean they lived off VC money for >10 years?

> There are many more "open core" companies, like TimescaleDB, Docker, etc, who then sell proprietary services on top of the open source software

As above. Since when is Docker making lots of money?

[candiddevmike]

If this doesn't move the needle expect more increases to their licensing. Though I don't know how it could become more expensive.

[ZiiS]

What is so frustraiting is their model seems sound; they just had rediculusly high pricing.