Thoughts about the HashiCorp fiasco

My favorite take on HashiCorp’s move to BSL comes from Peter Zaitsev. Now that I’ve had a little bit of time to reflect, I wanted to write out some thoughts of my own.

— First of all, profits, profits, profits. HashiCorp isn’t profitable; this is a problem for a lot of open source company, and well honestly a lot of venture-backed companies in general. I think in general the industry places too little focus on profitability, so that companies get huge, still aren’t profitable, and are forced to make changes like this in an effort to get to profitability. You can get to a lot of revenue if you buy high and sell cheap….

PS, this is why I’d like to see Odoo get more airtime in conversations about open source companies. Sure, it’s not a sexy developer tool and the headquarters aren’t in sexy SFO but the company is profitable and to me, that’s what it’s all about.

— Second, I don’t resent businesses making business decisions. I don’t think there’s anything evil (at least about this decision — some businesses certainly do make decisions that I think are unethical, but moving away from an open source license doesn’t fall into that category for me) about HashiCorp’s decision. I’m more interested in whether or not it was a good business decision, and only time will tell. A lot of people’s immediate reaction was that it’s business suicide, just as they said the same about the Red Hat fiasco just a week or so earlier. But is it? I am not convinced it will be business suicide, in either case. I’m mostly curious how it will play out, business-wise, for both companies.

— Third: If I were an open source founder I would find the move demoralizing on a personal level. Because HashiCorp has been held up in the industry as the company you aspire to be. I am 100% sure there are founders out there who told themselves they were building the next HashiCorp. Now HashiCorp itself is not living up to HashiCorp the fantasy; the HashiCorp model doesn’t even work for HashiCorp.

— Lastly, there’s a real question to ask in the industry about what value having a truly open source project continues to bring to the business as the business grows and becomes market leader. The open source project might have made it easier to become the dominate technology, but once you’ve achieved dominance, does it still matter? I don’t have answers to these questions, but the HashiCorp license change raises them.

Your thoughts? Things I should consider but didn’t? Think I’m completely off my rocker? Respond and let me know.