Live data from Hacker News

HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

491–500 of 760 posts

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't mitchellh stepped down from a leadership role? Why would he have "the ultimate input on this decision"?

Did he give up his seat on the board? His voting rights? I assumed he still has, or effectively has, full control.

He also stepped down from the HashiCorp board[1].

[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/mitchell-s-new-role-at-hashic...

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#492

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…

The windows source is not avalible to _me_, even if they show it to some people. It is useful to have a term for source available to everyone.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#493
post #482
post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work for Amazon. AWS never offered MongoDB as a managed service, or used any of their server software when it was licensed under APLv3, or SSPLv1. However, we have contributed patches to MongoDB even after their license change to improve its performance on Graviton processors. Because that's what's good for customers, and MongoDB is an important customer and partner. AGPLv3 gives all the permissions nee…

Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service? Does Amazon contribute funding back to the software projects they offer as a service? Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?

> Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service?

Each use of AGPLv3 licensed software has to be reviewed to ensure that the obligations of the license can be and will be met (and also screen for cases where it is known that the vendor of software does not prefer a company like Amazon import the software under a FOSS license). Today we use AGPLv3 licensed software internally, and include AGPLv3 licensed software in Amazon Linux (Ghostscript, in particular).

> Does Amazon contribute funding back to the software projects they offer as a service?

Yes, in varying ways. For example, it is not easy to provide "funding" for something like Apache Kafka. You need to have people working on the upstream.

> Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?

Yes, but not all changes are appropriate for upstream.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#494
post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the Pulumi Individual Edition open for use by solo founders operating as a sole proprietership? I can't find anything clarifying whether it's individual (as in hobbyist, nonprofessional) or individual, as in, one person not collaborating with anyone else.

Yes it is open to individual comercial use (companies much larger then sole proprieterships may only have one person doing inferstructure). They also have a version for nonprofits https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/open-source-free-tier/

Do you have a source for that (or are you affiliated)?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#495
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your business can't succeed using an open source license you made poor business choices. Own it, don't blame the license or the open source community.

You make it sound the licence is infallible The licence could be the problem in how the competitors are operating and leaching

No-one forces you to use the license in the first place.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#496
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they made their tools AGPL, they themselves couldn’t build a cloud offering with additional, closed-source features.

Only if you accept contributions without a license grant CLA.

And this is why I think people who love Software Freedom should think twice about signing a CLA for their copyleft licensed contributions. [1]

inbound=outbound license terms is a good norm for FOSS. Why should a software vendor play by different rules than everyone else when it comes to things like copyleft compliance?

[1] https://meshedinsights.com/2021/06/14/legally-ignoring-the-l...

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#497
Honestly speaking, I'm not surprised, not because it's HashiCorp, because they are moving away from BSD/MIT style license to a much more restrictive source-available style license.

"Open Source" software always have been loved by companies because it provided extreme flexibility (closed forks, forks for customers, secret sauce addition, etc.), plus announced the message that their code is free for all, given there's no warranties.

These companies have skipped more nuanced licenses such as Apache, MPL, EPL even GPL in some cases, trusting that every actor in the software landscape is rational and ethical.

The idea was nice, but it involved humans.

After a couple high caliber forks, HashiCorp indeed felt the pain, and reflexively they moved to BSL.

What they forgot is their initial license has been designed to allow this in the first place. MIT/BSD/Expat is not suitable for monolithic code bases of this size, but people won't listen.

On the other hand, the code is HashiCorp's. They can do whatever they want with the code they write and put out there. They decided to change the terms they share their license, and nobody can say anything about it.

Is it ethical? No. Were the forks were ethical? Depends on motivation.

These things happen when you choose a license without much consideration for the future.

Maybe we shouldn't abuse Open Source software this much and embrace "Free Software" more, but this is just me.

So, at the end, "market forces" abused HashiCorp and, HashiCorp reacted. This is a normal impact/response event. Nothing extraordinary.

Edit: While one may argue that this is also similar with RedHat/IBM, The impact of the change, the number of broken promises, ecosystem dynamics and the motivation behind it make it different, yet I don't want to double the size of this comment.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#499

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…

>like the AGPL? As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.

> but is no longer considered FOSS.

It's no longer considered FOSS because it's no longer FOSS.

> Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.

That's a weird thing to say. You're happy with it happening, and everybody else using bad definitions won't change that.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#500
post #493
post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service? Does Amazon contribute funding back to the software projects they offer as a service? Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?

> Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service? Each use of AGPLv3 licensed software has to be reviewed to ensure that the obligations of the license can be and will be met (and also screen for cases where it is known that the vendor of software does not prefer a company like Amazon import the software under a FOSS license). Today we use AGPLv3 licensed software internally, and include A…

Thanks for the answers, very interesting.
Post reply on HN