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Right, and that's why people are upset that Hashicorp is (in a sense) taking away their contributions to this open source project without paying for it.

Yeah... that's not what you meant.

Virtually no one is actively disagreeing here with Hashicorp's right the charge money for the software they built. But it's just a different model, in which so many outside contributors would not have been... contributors.




They wouldn't have been contributors, because they wouldn't have paid for it in first place.

So when yet another company finds out that when VC money runs out, someone has to actually pay for something, everyone gets the pitchforks.

Meanwhile in other professions, when someone does something for free, that is charity.


The product would have been worse without the contributions. More expensive for Hashicorp to maintain. And if it wouldn't have been free, their value proposition would have been very different. People would've used alternatives, for many of them that'd have meant something homegrown. Terraform would not have been so successful, Hashicorp wouldn't have been as big a company as it now is, as a result. The model as it was was a win-win for everybody. But sure, freeloader competitors may be a fair concern of Hashicorp, thank goodness they solved that problem, didn't they? But at what expense, they are disturbing an equilibrium that was established between themselves and their users.


It would have been fine to charge up front. It's the bait and switch that's annoying.




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