The Pulse #64: Pressure on Commercial Open Source to Make More Money
HashiCorp changes its license, while Insomnia looks for ways for users to create personal accounts. Is commercial open source software (COSS) becoming more or less sustainable with these changes?
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Today's topics are:
Industry pulse. A roundup of recent events, with commentary.
Insomnia: tension between monetization and serving free users. In the latest version of the popular API debugging tool, users must create an account or lose access to local data and projects.
The fall of Rome Tools: an open source project shuts down. Rome raised $4.5M on its ambitious vision to build an end-to-end JavaScript development toolchain. Two years later, the project was shut down but lives on, thanks to open source.
HashiCorp: a divisive open source license change. The company behind Terraform has adopted a much more restrictive license for its products, perhaps to try and boost revenue and hit competitors to its cloud offering. Can we expect similar license changes by COSS companies to follow?