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by mdaniel 545 days ago
> 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

1 comments

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.

> 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.