This seems to ignore the first part of the story, where Hashicorp builds up a community around an open source project and relicenses the project. OpenTofu and now OpenBao wouldn't have happened if Hashicorp didn't relicense in the first place.
Valve's 2 hour refund option came in direct response to a 2014 lawsuit from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission[1].
Rod Sims, head of ACCC at the time, asserted that Valve's original no-refund stance broke Australian law.
> Under Australian Consumer Law, everybody who buys a product or a service has a right to a refund if the product doesn’t work. They have a right to a refund, or a repair. Those rights are enshrined in Australian Law, and our allegation is that Valve sought to remove those consumer rights which is a breach of Australian Consumer Law
Is it any more shortsighted than using the "open tools" in the first place? There will be integration costs and maintenance of integration with open tools. You may not be able to pay anyone for support issues because those people may not provide the sort of customer support you expect when you pay someone.
It’s not sudden and it’s not limited to python libraries.
The popular open source projects make great targets for low-multiple acqui-hires, derisking the investment. They also have huge established branding and generally obvious opportunities for displacing existing players. In a non-zero interest rate environment, those factors make established open source projects a more appealing bet.
Since they mentioned the company, undercutting and eating the market share of DataBricks is enough to appeal to some investors.
> whether an OSS project lends itself to monetization is a really interesting and subtle question. rule of thumb, be at least two of these: big, boring (roughly correlates with "infrastructural" as @patio11 puts it), and lacking obvious substitutes
The monetization strategy is only a part of the viability story.
When projects vendor or copy from other projects, license bodies typically include all relevant copyright statements and licenses even if the license body is the same as the parent project.
NodeJS uses the MIT license [1] and reproduces the license for the MIT-licensed Acorn.
OP stripped the copyright statement and license attribution without mentioning hlky or the originating project in the license file. OP proceeded to confuse matters by assuming that "AGPL" suffices. It seems like the copyright statement was the offense here.
A simple email or github issue might have resolved the matter. Given the tenor of the relationship between the OP and hlky it should be no surprise that hlky opted for the "nuclear option"
Does it matter if "the guy is doing proper crypto" if he is getting paid by "pyramid scheme money"? Arguably it is worse since his presence is ostensibly legitimizing the "pyramid schemes". It feels like the techie version of celebrity endorsement
It's not unreasonable for the US federal government to ban employees of the US federal government from using Australian banking apps on work devices issued by the US federal government.
It is a separate conversation if any of those variables change.
If you walk the logic to its conclusion, you might be better off taking the ToS ban:
"received wrong item but didn't fight" -> "concern that future orders may be wrong" -> "use amazon less or for smaller items" -> "prime is not worth it" -> "leave"
The difference between that and the chargeback, at first blush, is that you at least get your money back on the item if you chargeback.
Repairability and general hackability are core design goals of the Steam Deck compared to other devices. On the software side, they don't hide the desktop Linux core.
It's the VC-funded OSS playbook (restrictive open source, monetize support and advanced deployments until the open source loses potency, relicense). Cal.com took money from https://oss.capital/portfolio and others
Bootstrapped small businesses can have the same scaling potential as startups. They just value sustainable growth over business fragility. It seems foolish during summers but that mentality allows bootstrapped businesses to survive winters in a way that startups can't.
Hosting is the obvious answer. Deno is monetizing in the same exact way (https://deno.com/deploy/pricing) and they managed to raise much more money with the same playbook.