Community Growth At: HashiCorp | Hacker News Reader

Community Growth At: HashiCorp

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14 pointsGarethX11 comments

Is this astroturfing? I'm not trying to be provocative, but this line was buried in the article:

> Its licensing switch and the fact that it isn't yet profitable shows there is still work to be done.

My understanding is that Hashicorp has lost both money and community good will basically overnight. I don't see how that's an example of successfully doing "community first". It seems more like an example of taking too much investment, using that to "buy" support by giving away software and then failing to figure out to how monetize, so immediately turning your back on your "community".

EDIT: I don't want to imply anything negative about specific folks at the company who do care about community, just Hashicorp the company.

Not astroturfing, just my take - I have no connection to the company. There's a section that goes into the licensing change a little more, but in my view, there's a lot of great stuff that can be learned from HashiCorp's approach to community from before the licensing change that is worth knowing about. If anything it highlights just what they've put at stake by making that move.

Kind of a crazy read given the change to a non-open source license and the OpenTF fork. Really feels downplayed.

Is it possible this is not recent and just didn't age well? I don't see a date of creation or update on it so it's hard to tell.

The web archive only has crawls of this from today, so it might be new.

This was just published 2 hours ago according to the RSS feed.

No, it's new, although was completed a couple of days before their announcement and updated to reference it. My audience is primarily community managers, DevRel, and community-minded rev teams and HashiCorp have done an exemplary job at community-led until the licensing change. There's a lot such folks can learn from before the licensing change, I didn't want to wipe that away. Also, I didn't see it as my place to provide too much commentary on it specifically, since the impact isn't yet fully understood.

>HashiCorp have done an exemplary job at community-led until the licensing change

Have they? Obviously, part of this should be taking care of yourself, and HashiCorp wasn't exactly profitable. It could be argued they didn't monetize the right things, and that led to a bad desperation move.

If you read article it outlines why I think so. Profitability is a larger issue than their community programs. Although, the process of converting community into customers is still slow for them, which I think is a contributing factor for sure.

"The project will remain free, open source, and liberally licensed..."

Welp, that didn't age well.

MPL 2.0 is traditional "open source," which was fine when they used it -- but switching to BSL is a step backwards -- as it's considered "source-available," not open source in any reasonable sense.

Being unhappy that others are taking advantage of your open source contributions (without giving back) is valid, but this isn't the answer.

[Background: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou... ]

Its almost like being open allows people to choose what they do with your stuff, and whether or not they decide to contribute back is part of that choice. Crazy right?

Hashicorp has really done a number. They didnt footgun themselves, they shot both their legs off in one go. They displaced a community, who, at least in some part, were contributing back, AND they destroyed trust in their company, thus trust with the rest of their products. The license change made me really start questioning the continued use of their other tools; i already have issues with their toolset in general (various things depending on the tool).

Contributors to (F)OSS projects is always a very low percentage of the userbase, in fact statistically outside of small projects where the developer and their friend are the only one using it, as a project gains popularity there will be fewer contributors (by percentage). And on that note, if you (not you specifically, in this case im saying you as in Hashicorp) dont like that people dont contribute back to OSS projects, then dont release open software, or make a nasty license that says you can only use the software if you make meaningful contributions back to the software within a reasonable time. I bet you can guess the result; no one uses your software. Being a(n) (F)OSS project means more than just gaining contributors and a community. Those are side effects of being open source, not a (valid) reason to make an oss project to start. Its not only giving the world a source to work their own things from and learn from, its also providing the world a tool (most often for free) that doesnt necessarily rely on some blackbox corporation pinky swearing its not stealing data or turning around and doing something nasty later

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