[hamandcheese]

By now, this kind of open source rug pull is becoming routine. I'm really not sure how I feel about it. I'm thankful for all the free stuff, and I can't fault anyone for trying to make a buck or two.

I'm a huge advocate of free software, but mostly for personal use and individual freedom. So I don't feel like the loss of Scylla is a great loss in that respect. I can't imagine a lot of individuals are harmed by this move.

But still, it makes me distrust corporate "open source" more and more.

[jsiepkes]

Definitely also understand everyone needs to make a living.

Buuuttt... projects like these would probably never haven gotten the traction they have now if they wouldn't have started out as opensource but being closed source. For example Hashicorp and Redis definitely wouldn't be where they are today if they had start out as opensource. So in that sense these license changes are a bait and switch.

[mdaniel]

> For example Hashicorp and Redis definitely wouldn't be where they are today if they had start out as opensource

What makes you think there are genuine open source projects that don't get traction? Ansible is still GPLv3 even while owned by RedHat^W IBM and works fine. Any one of the bazillions of front-end toolkits, build tools, bundlers, whatever, many initiated by some company and practically all under open source licenses.

My experience has been that if something is useful, and its open source license means one can fix bugs they encounter or at least have a small chance it'll remain around indefinitely (not go out of business) in order to bake it into your workflow, then it'll be adopted and blogged about and show up in HN and Reddit

[thayne]

I think GP agrees with you. They were saying that Scylladb (or redis, or hashicorp, etc.) never would have gotten as much traction if it had been proprietary from the begining. Being open source helped them get where they are, but now they are abandoning open source.

In fact I strongly suspect that this license change will do more than upset existing users of their open source version, it will scare off potential new users and customers. Not only are they no longer open source, but they gave people a reason not to trust them.

[jsiepkes]

> I think GP agrees with you. They were saying that Scylladb [...]

Thanks, that was what I was trying to convey. I noticed I made a rather "impactful" mistake in this sentence:

> [...]today if they had start out as opensource[...]

That should read "hadn't"... Sorry about that.

[mdaniel]

I believe it's the rights assignment that should raise the "a rug pull is inevitable" alarm, not the corporate part

There are plenty of corporate projects that don't require rights assignment to submit changes, just a DCO or even just $(git commit -s)

[tommiegannert]

I think it's great that we're cleaning up the nomenclature.

In the 90s, we had shareware/freeware/beerware. No one expected source availability. At universities, the Unix world had open source, in the real sense. Then something happened that caused these two tracks to merge.

Maybe the university students grew up and carried on their belief in open source, but also had to create the business. After 20 years, they realized (1) it doesn't have to be open source to _feel right_ and (2) maintaining in the open is more expensive. They're now in management positions, not coding. Selling B2B doesn't require code to be open to the public, since you can have source available licenses. And as you said, perhaps ScyllaDB isn't really targeting the hobbyist. We'll continue this trend.

Or perhaps open source has stopped being a buzzword. We're now much more of a SaaS world, where being open source isn't as important as costing $10 per month or having 200 "data partners" that need to track you.

That said, I think there's a really good reason for core libraries and security-sensitive libraries to be open. I want to be able to inspect them, before using them. And I'm in the HN crowd of actually using open source code because I can fix bugs as I encounter them, but I realize this is a small crowd.

I'd love for open source to be a useful word again, and not something that goes on the Silicon Valley PR budget.