Maybe, for Vault, in the enterprise release, but 6.4B for that and the Terraform Cloud. Marketing, training, sales, ... community advocates don't have that value.
There are better options, could have acquired Env0 and commit employees to support the forks.
I believe Dave McJannet, HashiCorp's CEO, should be concerned. OpenTofu has garnered massive support, with the project gaining admission to the Linux Foundation and even receiving public support from companies like Allianz. Within HashiCorp, the CEO has fostered a toxic culture characterized by a large workforce that strives to do as little as possible, relying solely on the dedication of a few committed employees, many of whom left the company shortly after the IPO.
The pricing "strategy," the culture of secrecy, subpar commercial and marketing practices, and the company's inability to formulate a successful cloud and monetization strategy are all squarely the responsibility of HashiCorp's CEO. Merely changing the licensing approach will not resolve the current issues. There is an urgent need for a change in leadership, a more robust embrace of the community, and the addressing of the issue of lazy employees. HashiCorp should also return to its core principles, possibly trimming down its focus areas (Integrity, Kindness, Pragmatism, Humility, Vision, Execution, Communication, etc.).
Terraform had the greatest potential for monetization within HashiCorp, but this required innovation and effort. They possessed all the necessary tools, brand recognition, and community support, but instead chose to impede competition, failing to realize that they were harming themselves in the process.
OpenTofu has the potential to genuinely enhance Terraform, as changes will be viewed not as aiding competitors but as a shared initiative aimed at improving the entire community and sharing the benefits.
> OpenTofu has garnered massive support, with the project gaining admission to the Linux Foundation and even receiving public support from companies like Allianz.
I don't know. It feels like this support comes from the vocal minority and competitors.
I'll believe such a statement when more big multinational companies show support. Right now, I don't believe there is as much support as is currently made out.
There are around 19 full-time engineers staffed for the project from various companies. That is a lot more engineers than HashiCorp themselves had developing Terraform at the time of the license change.
I do wish, for their own good, OpenTF/Tofu would stop making this comparison. What insight do they have about HashiCorp’s resourcing beyond some git commit history? Surely these folks know there are many more folks involved in providing a product with the scope of TF than just those committing code. While I do find myself nodding along to many of the OpenTF points, whenever I hear this one on podcasts and such it comes off as very naive.
To complement sibling post, some other stuff that I think makes it clear that open-source was not one of HashiCorp's values even before this change:
DM@07:30: So how we think about it is, we're kind of obsessive about journeys. [...] And we decompose the personas into two: there's the practitioner, and then there's the decision-maker. The practitioner, you're trying to progress through a journey of discover and learn, try and trial, use and advocate— and you do not care if they buy anything from you. The decision-maker you're trying to progress through the why/try/buy journey. [...] It is a pre-dredged river, it is not fair; they do not know what is happening to them. They are not going where they think they are going— they are going where I want them to go. [...] And it turns out it works.
GS: Is there anything specific, do you think, about open-source that you layer in?
DM: For us, open-source is really just a distribution channel. (Also it's a development channel, but predominantly it's a distribution channel.) [...] So I don't think it matters whether it's open-source or not, as much as just being really, really obsessive about the digital videogame that you play.
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On the one hand, it's nice that Dave McJannet is so up-front about these strategies, how manipulation is a part of them, and how much market positioning is about pushing people around to retain control of an ecosystem.
On the other hand, he sounds like a pushy, arrogant asshole tbf.
Sure, some of it. In Uppercase the most important strategy messages.
DM: Dave McJannet, CEO at HashiCor
GS: Glenn Solomon, GGV Capital Managing Partner
15:22 GS: "...reminds me a little bit of you know when you when you listen to Mitchell and Armand talk about the early days with the open source and how they were kind of you know hand to hand go really going going for meetup to meet up and trying to get feedback from users..."
15:43 DM "yeah I think open source lends us up really well to the rapid open feedback loops which is one of the reasons why I think the best products are built in open source YOU HAVE TO BE REALLY CLEAR ON WHAT THE MONETIZATION PATH IS but but the feedback groups are hard to beat um you know I think the the neat thing about that we've done is we actually uh we did it on six different products and now eight so we've kind of run the same..."
16:18 DM "how do you get that minimum viable audience right that there are different ways you can do that in the early days we did that through social media um I have to talk about that one um and you know content and entertaining people but I think this notion of also building Network effects into the products is the other reason so yes we went knocking door to door but it was deeply considered in terms of how you integrate..."
16:43 DM "think about how terraform works as an example there's terraform core and then there's a plug-in for every piece of infrastructure in the world THAT'S ON PURPOSE RIGHT AND THE PROJECT'S ACTUALLY CONSTRUCTED THAT WAY SO THAT OTHER PEOPLE CONTRIBUTE AND COLLABORATE so there are lots of different ways to do that but ultimately it's about Network effects and how you drive it and then..."
17:11 GS "Dave start with you maybe uh talk a little bit more about like uh what what that TERRAFORM PROVIDER COMMUNITY is built um uh how you get third parties involved and like what what's been some of the secret sauce that's made it so Central"
18:08 DM "... so I went to Microsoft and I went to Oracle and I said hey I think we can help you I went to Google we can really help you because you're way behind and and and we actually did BD deals with them to to get into their communities to make it relevant to their communities and IT WAS DELIBERATE there are only four communities that mattered at that time and we kind of played them off against each other then we invested deeply in this digital distribution channel OF A MALICIOUS USER JOURNEY to success for people it was a combination of that kind of the anchor tenants plus the big investment in the digital experience plus you know we you know we to this day we probably have 60 people..."
18:54 DM "today yeah so today there are about two and a half thousand terraform providers out there in the world we develop about five of them um because what we were able to do is WE'RE ABLE TO FLIP THE MARKET AGAIN THIS IS A LOT IT'S A LONGER LONGER DESCRIPTION IT'S LIKE IT'S IT'S VERY MALICIOUS IT'S THE RIGHT WORD so what we did is we said hey we decomposed the project into core Plus providers because that's how you do it in the open source Community we control core outright and play every committer but anybody can contribute to a provider but number one we control the certification process right nobody else can certify it number two we then when we got to you know we knew if we got to 200 The Fortune 500 using terraform to interface TO AMAZON IT WAS OVER BECAUSE THEY'RE IN CHARGE not Amazon and so you were then able to force every isv in the world to say if you want to be part of you know JP Morgan's Cloud program you have to build a terraform provider so it was a combination of a few things like that but IT'S VERY VERY DELIBERATE SORT OF THE ARCHITECTURE of the projects owning the certification process and then then owning the key communities that you care about..."
What is actually acquiring? Where is the value?
Maybe, for Vault, in the enterprise release, but 6.4B for that and the Terraform Cloud. Marketing, training, sales, ... community advocates don't have that value.
There are better options, could have acquired Env0 and commit employees to support the forks.
I think IBM has not been properly advised.