Corporate Open Source is Dead
That's four months after HashiCorp rugpulled their entire development community and ditched open source for the 'Business Source License.'
Some people wonder if HashiCorp's decision to drop open source was because they wanted to juice the books for a higher price. I mean, six billion dollars? And they're not even a pointless AI company!
And last year, I covered how Red Hat found a way to just barely comply with the open source GPL license for their Enterprise Linux distro.
Other companies like MongoDB, Cockroach Labs, Confluent, Elasticsearch, and Sentry also went 'Source Available'. It started with some of the smaller players, but as rot sets in at even the biggest 'open source' companies, open source devs are choosing the nuclear option.
Terraform, HashiCorp's bread and butter, was forked into OpenTofu, and adopted by the Linux Foundation. Companies who built their businesses on top of Terraform quickly switched over. Even juicier, OpenBao—a fork of HashiCorp's other big project Vault—is backed by IBM! What's going to happen with that fork now?
At least forks seem pretty straightforward in Hashi-land. In the wake of Redis' wanton destruction, it seems like there's a new fork every week!
