> The elephant in the room here is that software is incredibly expensive. Developing and maintaining a large project requires a large team of high salary software devs.
There's plenty of expensive, major open source projects that seem to have figured this out. The fact that Hashicop can't doesn't mean the model is broken, it just means Hashicorp aren't very good at this.
> Someone just using the software to resell in the cloud or rebranding it can instead put all that money and mental energy into marketing and ops.
It's not that simple. Once again, the "reseller" doesn't have control over the direction of their business. Which means they should always fail, long term, relative to the org that actually spends the money on controlling the development.
If you can't compete and outmanoeuvre someone who's simply slapping a label on your software, you probably shouldn't release your software under an OSS license.
> The company that does not have to maintain the software has a massive advantage. They’re freed from that burden.
I think it's pretty clear that we both take very different views on what maintaining and developing software means. You see it as a massive burden, I see it as an enormous advantage / opportunity.
> There's plenty of expensive, major open source projects that seem to have figured this out
Like? Red Hat are the only one, and they sell very special software. I can't think of any other ones that are successful as a fully open source project that also has a sustainable profitable business build on top of it.
There's plenty of expensive, major open source projects that seem to have figured this out. The fact that Hashicop can't doesn't mean the model is broken, it just means Hashicorp aren't very good at this.
> Someone just using the software to resell in the cloud or rebranding it can instead put all that money and mental energy into marketing and ops.
It's not that simple. Once again, the "reseller" doesn't have control over the direction of their business. Which means they should always fail, long term, relative to the org that actually spends the money on controlling the development.
If you can't compete and outmanoeuvre someone who's simply slapping a label on your software, you probably shouldn't release your software under an OSS license.
> The company that does not have to maintain the software has a massive advantage. They’re freed from that burden.
I think it's pretty clear that we both take very different views on what maintaining and developing software means. You see it as a massive burden, I see it as an enormous advantage / opportunity.