Actual full license seems to be here: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/e94ce2dd3877096b...
HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
101–110 of 760 posts
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#102All this implies is that Hashicorp is no longer an open source company. Many of Hashicorp's actions like this one run completely against the nature of open source software. Another example is `Hashicorp Vault Secrets` - which they just launched as a closed-source SaaS only tool.
I'm obviously very biased, but take a look at Infisical as an open source alternative to Vault: https://github.com/Infisical/infisical (we run under MIT + some enterprise features).
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#103I wonder how this affects Pulumi
Your line of thinking was that Pulumi uses terraform providers under the hood, right ?
It’s a good question. I suspect several forks might be happening as we speak.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#104Earlier 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.
If I have to pay developers, operate a business, allocate time and money to create value and take the risk that comes with it, and you come and take my work unchanged, strip all atribution and mereley resell it, then I can't succeed by definition. The most talented businessman on earth cannot. If that's what you think open source is, it'll vanish. No commercial system can exist like that and it should not because it…
> If that's what you think open source is, it'll vanish.
Free software has been fine without any businessmen or companies involved, we don't need your or any company's approval. It seems like the only thing that will vanish from the open source sphere are companies with flawed business plans.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#105Nothing wrong with this imo. I actually hope more open source projects start with a business source license if their ultimate goal is to become a SaaS platform. I think we've seen time and time again large enterprises abusing the spirit of open source for their own monetary gain, contributing nothing back, and just acting in bad faith.
> abusing the spirit of open source for their own monetary gain For many, the spirit of open source is to allow it to be used in any way, commercially or otherwise. I don't consider it acting in bad faith at all to use what's out there and made available, and I am happy to give things away as in beer. Otherwise it's not open source (which is also fine, not all software has to be open source). To abuse the spirit of o…
> To abuse the spirit of open source
The main way I think about this and how I often see people act are that actions which undermine the long term success and sustainability open source community is abusive. So you take a behavior and say if a non-trivial number of people emulated/copied this behavior will the open source community survive long term, if the answer is no, then the behavior is abusive.
Of course people disagree with what will lead to long term sustainability of open source projects and communities, though it does seems like a reasonable heuristic to the first degree of approximation.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#106All 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…
> without providing material contributions back
They need more open PRs? It's not like these contributions would necessarily be welcome.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> on all future releases of HashiCorp products Anything before the change is still MPL and can be forked and built on top of freely.
> Anything before the change is still MPL and can be forked and built on top of freely. per my reading of FAQ if you fork and modify old MPL it still have to be MPL, so if hashicorp fork old MPL code they need to release it under MPL.
Which does not disclaim "be forked and built on top of freely", especially given that Hashicorp products (in the modern era, at least) are written in Go and MPL is a file-level license: creating a new file in the same module under a non-MPL license and shipping it beside the MPL code as one broader unit is, I believe, fair game. But even still: MPL is a legitimate open source license that just asks that you give your changes back to the community. Seems like a fair trade to me.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#108I’m a full time engineer, working on OSS for more than a decade. As much as I love open-souce, I get the point that there are a bunch of freeloaders using stuff and not contributing back.
If you don't want "free"loaders using your software why is it "free" in the first place?
By any chance are you familiar with Little Free Library (https://littlefreelibrary.org/), those public boxes for people to take or leave books? How would you feel if someone took ALL the books, repeatedly, and then sold them? Would you just shrug and say "well that's totally fine, why is it free in the first place?"
This behavior is antisocial, and completely destroys the offering/concept for everyone.
I have a bootstrapped software company with an open-core product. Meanwhile, a VC-backed startup that has raised over $100m of funding decided to use one of my core open source libraries (which they haven't contributed to in any way) for a critical component of their commercial product, which also overlaps with my product's functionality in some ways.
In response, I eventually made the difficult decision to archive that library's repo and moved its functionality into my main product in a way that prevented external use. So then this startup created a hostile fork of my library, and started to implement functionality that is only present in my own commercial product.
After that, I had to waste several months of unpaid time just to make their fork of my own library no longer easily compatible with recent versions of my own product. Some time later, finally the startup decided to abandon use of my library altogether and wrote their own similar library (which was undoubtedly much easier for them, being able to see all the edge cases my library already handled).
My lesson from all this: I will never create another new large open source product ever again. Too many sociopaths out there for the system to work at all. If I ever decide to make something source-available, I will consider BSL.
And before someone says "why not AGPL?", it is because many companies don't touch AGPL software with a ten-foot pole. My sense is that adopting AGPL for a brand new product typically causes the product to be dead on arrival. That said, I would honestly love to be wrong here.
If there are a lot of AGPL open core / commercial FOSS companies that have been successful, please share examples, I say this genuinely and without snark.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for That sounds like what the GP comment is saying. If someone said "turns out open source doesn't work for our business model" it's hard to argue with. If instead they talk about "evolving open source models" and whatnot, it feels like they want the best of both worlds. It's been happening a lot recently that companies pretend they are "open sourci…
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.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#110All 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…
Based on multiple previous employers of mine, it seems like software companies start noticeably going downhill about 1.5 years after they go public. Let's check Wikipedia and see how I did: > On 29 November 2021, HashiCorp set terms for its IPO ...I'm starting to think I'm onto something. (I do welcome anecdata that either helps or hurts my hypothesis)
> it seems like software companies start noticeably going downhill about 1.5 years after they go public.
I firmly believe this is a fact too.
One place I recently worked, I joined as it was going public and it went downhill quickly. The friends I’d made there talked about the fun perks, holidays and benefits the company was known for. Over the space of less than a year most of the culture atrophied, people left in droves and there were exactly zero holidays or perks given out.