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Jeff Geerling: Corporate Open Source Is Dead


BM is buying HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. That's four months after HashiCorp rugpulled their entire development community and ditched open source for the 'Business Source License.' As someone on Hacker News pointed out so eloquently: IBM is like a juicer that takes all the delicious flavor out of a fruit skywhopper replied: "HashiCorp already did a great job pre-draining all their flavor." Some people wonder if HashiCorp's decision to drop open source was because they wanted to juice the books for a higher price.

[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. By working on a project with a CLA, where you sign away your code, you're giving carte blanche for the company to take away your freedom to use their software. But as money dries up, as more developers get laid off after the insane hiring trends of the past five years, maybe small dev teams can move the needle.

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