[MAGZine]

because there's a contention between the people developing the software and the startup community.

it's obvious that for a company (money-making entity), that they're going to want to have a monopoly in providing the software aaS. That's the monetization strategy on otherwise free software.

I don't think this is surprising. We saw this years ago with AWS and MongoDB. Yes, a startup can offer Vault cheaper since they don't have to pay for developers to build the software, and, in fact, they get to offshore their support costs to the developing company too ("yay" OSS).

I don't like it, but for a corporation that is trying to develop OSS, it makes perfect sense.

[ec109685]

Hashicorp wouldn’t be in the position they are without being open source in the beginning.

Think about all the reduction in sales cost their open source model resulted in. Because they were open source, they had a foot in the door and in-built evangelism.

Once that stopped being an advantage and they had utilized all the community goodwill by being open source, they make this change.

[api]

SaaS itself is against the spirit of open source, if not the letter of the license. It is the most closed model of providing software, far more closed than closed source binaries. Whether it runs on open source behind the scenes doesn’t matter; your data is controlled by the provider and you have no privacy or ability to run anything on your own terms.

At the very least anyone using open source to run SaaS for profit should be giving something back to the authors of the software. That’s the least they can do given the user hostility of the model as typically implemented.

Open source is stuck in the 90s and has failed to respond to the rise of SaaS or “the new closed.” The big mechanism of restricting freedom now is closed execution, ownership of the network effect, and closed data not closed source. Google could open every bit of their source and nothing would be gained freedom-wise.

[sneak]

SaaS is not software; SaaS is a service. The spirit of free software is giving software away as a gift and a tool for people to use to do whatever they like with it, business included.

Running a service based on free software is absolutely within the spirit of free software. Free software isn't about a circle of gifts, it's about software freedoms. You're not obligated in spirit to "give something back" because you use free software.

[miraculixx]

Well yes and no.

Yes it's ok to use OSS to operate your business. That's a sound and intended way of using OSS. Everyone benefits.

No it's not ok to provide a competing product to the very people that you get the core of it from. That's literally stealing if not fraud. At least it is ethically dubious.

I'm not saying it's literally a yes/no decision, but this is the baseline.

I think OSS projects should offer a paid for "integration license" by default.

[comprev]

And AWS with Elasticsearch too