What could Hashicorp have done to preserve trust while maintaining some kind of business model and being able to charge companies monetizing their software?
So software makers should give their competitors their software with a liberal free “as in beer” license and then try to compete with them.
This isn’t a workable or sustainable model. The companies leveraging free software don’t have to work nearly as hard on software which means they can focus 100% on ops and marketing. And of course they don’t give anything back to the software creators.
> So software makers should give their competitors their software with a liberal free “as in beer” license and then try to compete with them.
This is literally what they did when they released their product code under an OSS license. It was their free choice.
> This isn’t a workable or sustainable model. The companies leveraging free software don’t have to work nearly as hard on software which means they can focus 100% on ops and marketing. And of course they don’t give anything back to the software creators
The other companies might not need to work so hard, but they also have little to no control.
If you can't build a sustainable business on a piece of software when you are the steward of that software, control the product direction and backlog etc., then you're not very good at the business.
Or, put another way, if your business success hinges on people not competing when they have access to (and license to use) your source code, when releasing it under an OSS license demonstrates that you're not very good at the business.
> If you can't build a sustainable business on a piece of software when you are the steward of that software, control the product direction and backlog etc., then you're not very good at the business.
The elephant in the room here is that software is incredibly expensive. Developing and maintaining a large project requires a large team of high salary software devs.
I’d estimate the cost of building, supporting, and maintaining Vault at $3-4M a year bare minimum for the core team and related overhead. It also takes a ton of energy and focus all the way to the top of the organization.
The company building and maintaining the software must spend that. Someone just using the software to resell in the cloud or rebranding it can instead put all that money and mental energy into marketing and ops.
The company that does not have to maintain the software has a massive advantage. They’re freed from that burden.
You can only trust code you write and control yourself ultimately. How can you trust your operating system isn’t siphoning your doge coins as we speak?