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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#221

Post by pseudalopex »

falcolas wrote: post #158
pessimizer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if words have meaning, "closed source" does not provide source. Closed source does not mean "not open source."

Well then, according to the meaning you are assigning these words, Windows must be open source. Which, of course, is obviously false. Which means the words have different meaning than what you ascribe to them. Source available means you can view the source code, by abiding to the terms the owner of the code sets. Closed source means you can’t change or redistribute that source, regardless of whether you are allowed t…

Windows would be not open source and not closed source according to them. I think most people would call it closed source however.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#222

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #109
toomuchtodo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means out of survival. Source available is the new open source, and what young technologists will grow up grinding on. You’ll have folks complain about it during the transition (as happens with any Overton window sort of event), but they’ll move on eventually and a new crop of tech industry will grow up with this as the new normal. Change is inevitable, broadly sp…

> I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means out of survival. I don't think this is happening at all. Open source means the same thing it's always meant. Some people are just retreating from open source. Which is fine, they should be writing Free Software anyway if they want the world to have it, or use proprietary licenses if they don't. Otherwise very wealthy people will live on your back.

[deleted]

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#223

Post by jen20 »

comprev wrote: post #172
ris wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not contributing back Have you ever looked at the number of unreviewed PRs on Hashicorp projects?

Reviewing those PRs require engineer time from a HashiCorp employee - how many resources should be diverted to it?

It need not be HashiCorp employees. I merged as many (if not more) PRs into Terraform after leaving as I did while working there - the notion of community maintainers was nixed in 2018, though that was never communicated.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#224

Post by _ea1k »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #41
jamestanderson wrote: post #28

All that I get from this is that HashiCorp is no longer an open source company. > However, there are other vendors who take advantage of pure OSS models, and the community work on OSS projects, for their own commercial goals, without providing material contributions back. We don’t believe this is in the spirit of open source. This is 100% in the spirit of open source. If this is a problem for them, why not adopt an o…

Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for. High level, times have changed. Source should be (my two cents, ymmv) about a mutually beneficial partnership between builders and users, not “give it all away for free or you’re not legit.” Users get to understand and extend what they’re running (via source), while the project steward/maintainer/owner can continue to do so. It is a balance to be…

> Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for.

It isn't just the need to eat. There's also the issue of keeping investors happy and their continual drive to maintain growth or earnings at stratospheric levels.

Strict IP laws are the only safe way to do that, and that is why so much software has leveraged them over the years. The internet era felt like an aberration for a while, but things seem to be shifting back to high double digit margins as the only desirable goal.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#225

Post by tensor »

INTPenis wrote: post #170

License ethics discussion aside, this is going to cause mayhem! :D I know of at least one massive global company using vault in production, for free as a backend to their own password manager frontend. My own $dayjob was just going to set it up actually, I guess we'll have to re-evaluate that now. I can't even imagine how many companies use vault in production.

On the plus side they don't need to panic, they can keep using the last open source version and patch it themselves if needed.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#227

Post by jen20 »

jamestanderson wrote: post #78
theLiminator wrote: post #15

Did they have to get signoff from all contributors to relicense? I can't imagine this was a popular move for the people who contributed outside of hashicorp.

I believe they require contributors to sign their CLA: https://cla.hashicorp.com/ That CLA grants HashiCorp full license over your Copyright, and explicitly allows them to sublicense your contributions[1]. Drew Devault's blog posts[2][3] on this topic are extremely relevant. [1] > Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HashiCorp and to recipients of soft…

The CLA is a relatively recent thing. They certainly do not have my sign-off, though I haven't checked whether all code contributed after February of 2017 has been replaced (yet).

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#228

Post by andrewstuart2 »

randmeerkat wrote: post #214
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #167

That's pretty disappointing. I personally haven't used much beyond vault (I've used but not enjoyed or built anything on terraform), but this is pretty diametrically opposed to what I appreciated most about hashicorp products. Heck, I've even contributed a chunk of the code I use the most from vault (Cert management) and now I'm going to have to reevaluate whether I can attempt to use that service for customers going…

> That's pretty disappointing. From the article: “End users can continue to copy, modify, and redistribute the code for all non-commercial and commercial use, except where providing a competitive offering to HashiCorp.” Literally nothing has changed, this isn’t disappointing, it’s smart, they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community.

Maybe you missed my last sentence. I've been hacking on and off for a couple years on a side project I'd like to monetize, to capture some of my value add, while also giving back. (It's sorta "if you build it they will come" at this point tbh so I don't necessarily expect it to work). My project is sort of "OSS platform as a service" only I just deploy it for you and teach you to run it yourself, while jumping on a call occasionally if you need SRE for it, and continuing to iterate on tooling as well as make PRs to the tools as it makes sense. Vault and consul (as a vault backend only) are components I've used for that (via cert-manager so they're replaceable tbh) and I'm no longer sure if that's viable.

And generally as a contributor to the vault codebase, however small, I'm not thrilled they want to capture more value from it themselves while not offering me a miniscule chunk of that.

The whole cloud provider argument really feels a lot like Displaced Aggression. You're probably punishing the people smaller than you a lot more than you are the billion dollar cloud providers who can afford both expensive lawyers and can very easily afford to fork your codebases as we see with OpenSearch vs ElasticSearch.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#229

Post by CrLf »

Over the years, I think most people came to understand "open source" as something closer to "free software". However, that's clearly not the case for projects controlled by a single entity that require copyright assignments from contributors.

Copyright assignments are put in place for exactly this (allowing a single entity to relicense the whole codebase unilaterally based on their own interests), and we should maybe come up with a better term than "open source" for projects in this situation.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#230

Post by ugh123 »

randmeerkat wrote: post #214
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #167

That's pretty disappointing. I personally haven't used much beyond vault (I've used but not enjoyed or built anything on terraform), but this is pretty diametrically opposed to what I appreciated most about hashicorp products. Heck, I've even contributed a chunk of the code I use the most from vault (Cert management) and now I'm going to have to reevaluate whether I can attempt to use that service for customers going…

> That's pretty disappointing. From the article: “End users can continue to copy, modify, and redistribute the code for all non-commercial and commercial use, except where providing a competitive offering to HashiCorp.” Literally nothing has changed, this isn’t disappointing, it’s smart, they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community.

> they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community.

e.g. AWS -> Elasticsearch.

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