Corporate Open Source is Dead
Quoting: Corporate Open Source is Dead —
Meanwhile, Redis 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 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.
When a company rug pulls? Fork 'em. Literally!
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!
And some developers are even exploring ditching the Redis code entirely, like redka's 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 license itself! Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ scrapped together the OpenELA alliance to maintain forks of Enterprise Linux. And CentOS users who'll be left in a lurch as June marks the end of CentOS 7 support have to decide whether to use AlmaLinux or one of the ELA projects now.
All these moves shattered the playbook startups and megacorps 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 slow, companies slash headcount almost as fast as community trust.
Linuxiac:
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HashiCorp's Journey Ends in a $6.4 Billion IBM Acquisition
In a significant tech industry move, HashiCorp, a leader in cloud automation, has announced its acquisition by IBM for a whopping $6.4 billion – a strategic partnership aiming to fast-track the adoption of multi-cloud automation technologies.
Armon Dadgar, co-founder of HashiCorp, publicly announced the merger on April 24, 2024. He expressed his enthusiasm about the acquisition, seeing it as a monumental step to expand HashiCorp’s reach and enhance its offerings with IBM’s robust support.