Corporate Open Source is Dead
IBM is buying Hashi Corp for $6.4 billion with a B that’s four months after Hashi Corp rug pulled their entire development community and ditched open source for the business source license as someone on Hacker News pointed out eloquently IBM is like a juicer that takes all the delicious
flavor out of a fruit to which skyhopper replied Hashi cor party did a great job pre- draining all their flavor some people wonder if hashy corp’s decision to drop open source was because they wanted to juice the books for a higher price I mean $6 billion and they’re
not even a pointless AI company meanwhile Reedus dropped the open BSD license and invented their own source available license and last year I covered how red hat found a way to just barely scrape by in compliance with the open source GPL license for their Enterprise Linux drro other
companies like mongodb cockroach Labs confluent elastic search 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 when a company rug pulls Fork them literally
terraform hashy corpse bread and butter was forked into open tofu and adopted by the Linux Foundation companies who built their businesses on top of terraform quickly switched over even juicier open bow a fork
going to happen with that fork now at least Forks seem pretty straightforward in hashy land in the wake of reis’s want and destruction it seems like there’s a new Fork now every week and some developers you even exploring ditching the reddis code entirely like Reda an API compatible
wrapper on top of sqlite after Red Hat closed its door most of the way at least they didn’t try pulling a Switcheroo on the whole license itself Oracle Seuss and ciq scrapped together the open Ela Alliance to maintain Forks of Enterprise Linux and sentos users who are going
to be left in a Lurch in junee since sentos 7 support ends have to decide whether to use Amal Linux or one of the ELA projects now all these moves shattered The Playbook corporations used and now we’re seeing abused to build up billions in Revenue over the past
decade it was all in the name of Open Source as free money dries up and profits low companies slhe head count almost as fast as Community Trust 2024 is the year corporate open source or at least any remaining Illusions about it finally died it’s one thing to build
a product with a proprietary code base and charge for licenses you can still build communities around that model and it’s worked for decades just as Microsoft but it’s totally different when you build your product under an open- Source license Foster a community of users who then build their
own businesses on top of that software then yo the license when your software sales are affected that’s called a bait and switch Brian krol’s been sounding the alarm for years yes that Brian canol the one who posted this gem Brian’s whole presentation from 12 Years years ago is
worth a watch but the bottom line is summed up by this quote from Drew Deval contributor license Agreements are a strategy employed by commercial companies with one purpose only to place a rug under the project so that they can pull at the first sign of a bad quarter
this strategy exists to subvert the open-source social contract by working on a project with a CLA where you sign away your code you’re giving cart blanch for the company to take away your freedom to use their software from a company’s perspective if they want CLA or if they
want want to use an anti-open Source license they do not care about your freedoms they’re protecting revenue streams they’ll often talk about freeloaders whether it’s Amazon building a competing hosted solution or some startup that found a way to monetize support but in the end even if you have
GPL code and you charge people to get it it’s not truly free as in Freedom if the company restricts how you can use modify and share code but there’s a distinction here and I know a few people watching this are already yelling at me there’s free software and
there’s open source people in the free software Community correctly identified the danger of calling free software open source I don’t think we have to be so dogmatic about it but there is a fundamental philosophical difference between the free software Community with organizations like the free software foundation and
software Freedom Conservancy behind it and the more business-oriented open- Source culture open- source culture relies on trust trust that companies you and I helped build even without being on the payroll wouldn’t rug pull but time and time again again that trust is being shattered is this slow death
of corporate open source bad well it’s certainly been annoying especially for devs like me who felt connected to those communities in the past but it’s not all bad in fact this could be a huge opportunity what happened to spunky startups like anible hashy Corp elastic search or redus
they were lighting their Industries on fire with great new software what happened to building up communities of developers Crossing cultural and economic barriers to make software that actually changed the world there are still projects doing that but so many succumb to Enterprise money where eye watering Revenue puts
profit over philosophy but as money dries up as more developers get laid off after the insane hiring trends of the past 5 years maybe some small Dev teams can move the needle the AI bubble hasn’t popped yet so some great people unfortunately are getting sucked into that Vortex
but someone else could be on the cusp of the next great open source project just don’t add a CLA okay and it’s not just devs big companies can join in historically bad players like Microsoft and maybe even Oracle it pains me to say that they’ve even made strides
in the past decade and IBM could even menend some wounds like they could reunite open tofu and terraform there’s precedent like when io.js merged back into node.js after a fork in 2015 and people ask me a lot what could Red Hat do to get me interested in Enterprise
Linux again it’s simple stop treating people who don’t bring Revenue to the table like garbage freeloaders are part of open source whether they’re running a home lab or a competing business companies who want to befriend open source devs need to show they care about more than just money
unfortunately the trend right now is to rug pull to juice the quarterly because money line always must go up but you know what I just prefer honesty if revenue is so dependent on selling software just make the software proprietary don’t be so coy about it but to anyone
who’s not a multi-billion dollar Corporation don’t be a victim of the next rug pull the warning signs are clear don’t sign a CLA stay away from projects that require them stick to open source licenses that respect your freedom not licenses written to juice revenue and prep a company
for a billion doll buyout maybe it’s time for a new open- source Rebellion Maybe This Time money won’t change company culture as new projects arise from the ash heaps maybe not but at least we can try until next time I’m Jeff Garling
