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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
121–130 of 760 posts
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#122All 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…
Pulumi Founder/CEO here.
The blog post is disingenuous. We tried many times to contribute upstream fixes to Terraform providers, but HashiCorp would never accept them. So we've had to maintain forks. They lost their OSS DNA a long time ago, and this move just puts the final nail in the coffin.
Thankfully over time, they already pushed responsibility for most Terraform providers back onto their partners, so I'm hopeful the ecosystem of providers can still stay vibrant and open.
We are deep believers in open source---heck my last project at Microsoft was to take .NET open source and cross-platform, our CTO helped found TypeScript, and Pulumi is an Apache open source project---it seems HashiCorp no longer is.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also work on open source full time. I personally am happy to give my work away unconditionally to both freeloaders and contributors and fortunately my employer feels the same way (I am often a freeloader myself on unrelated projects). Ideally your moneymaker can compete on its own without being dependent upon gatekeeping how the open source part is used. But with project ownership means you can change the rules for…
I find it brave we had this generation of companies creating open-source business models. It’s a shame it didn’t work out for them due to bad actors. The trend I see is for the next generation of good open-source great ideas to be much more protective around their intellectual property. Such a loss, again, due to bad actors.
I don't think the loss is due to bad actors. These actors aren't bad, they're rational. I think the loss is due to giving away things unconditionally without thinking about what that means. Many companies aren't reneging on open source. The ones that are reneging can't compete on what they are selling, so they have to compete on what they're not selling.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not having competition is not the problem I have seen listed when abuse is talked about. It is not contributing back in ways that are promotional to how much the company is benefiting. Or not going out of their way to acknowledge that they started with someone else's open source project, not even something like an academic citation.
Open source licenses don't require you to do those things. That was the intention in coming up with them. They were the Bazaar people. They sold open source as something that makes software quality better. It was the counterpoint to Free Software, who said they made programs morally better, and that it was largely irrelevant whether copyleft made software quality better.
> Open source licenses don't require you to do those things. That was the intention in coming up with them.
I mentioned the cases I have seen the word abuse used as a counter point to 'If somebody doesn't want any competitors' which is not something I have seen brought up when taking about abusing the spirit of open source.
I was not taking about what the licenses legally bind you to do.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll never understand this attitude. Are some people contributing to open source principally for a kind of quid-pro-quo? I think it's nice when people contribute back, but it's certainly not a motivation for me to open source stuff - other than to set an example. People can do what they want with the software, that's the whole point. Full disclosure, I'm a shitty open source contributor, but I have some projects on g…
It’s not quid-pro-quo. At the same time, does that seem ethical (even if it is legal) to build some dysfunctional business models exploiting somebody’s open source for profit and not contributing back? There are many motivations such as mindshare, not reinventing the wheel and creating standards that motivate people and companies to contribute to open-source. Ripping-off other’s work - even when legally ok - is not r…
> does that seem ethical (even if it is legal) to build some dysfunctional business models exploiting somebody’s open source for profit and not contributing back?
You're describing a thing that happens here, and not even bothering to make an ethical argument against it. People are just supposed to accept the premise, and go on to discuss the implications of it.
> The system is designed to foster collaboration and not to enable shitty business models.
"Spirit of open source" people are arguing that the system wasn't designed at all. You're arguing that open source licenses themselves have little or nothing to do with open source licensing. Instead, it has something vaguely to do with freedom and friendly and collaborative and other nice words. You don't have to be friendly or collaborative to produce either open source or Free Software.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#126how this works from the point of view of current license? They can't just take MPL code and modify license terms in my reading of FAQ (Q9 in https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/ )?..
They required contributors to sign a licensing agreement.
Ok, then it was clear from the beginning that all this "open source" effort will go MySql route eventually
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Then I'd say that the abusive behavior is to imply there are terms in the license that aren't actually there, and to use that implication to attract developers and customers to your project. If your open source has a soul, write it into the license. Note that after you do that, it will not be an open source license.
I do not follow either of your statements. I do not know what you would use as an example for your first sentence. I do not know what you are trying to communicate with the last two sentences.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#128I’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.
I also work on open source full time. I personally am happy to give my work away unconditionally to both freeloaders and contributors and fortunately my employer feels the same way (I am often a freeloader myself on unrelated projects). Ideally your moneymaker can compete on its own without being dependent upon gatekeeping how the open source part is used. But with project ownership means you can change the rules for…
> it's also a sign that you fear your offering is not competitive enough without the rule change.
Agreed. It can't mean anything other than that you can't compete on a fair playing field, so you have to add restrictions to lock customers into your service. That you wrote the service is irrelevant since you licensed it as a gift to the world. It's exactly what Free Software was designed to thwart, and exactly what open source was designed to preserve.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also work on open source full time. I personally am happy to give my work away unconditionally to both freeloaders and contributors and fortunately my employer feels the same way (I am often a freeloader myself on unrelated projects). Ideally your moneymaker can compete on its own without being dependent upon gatekeeping how the open source part is used. But with project ownership means you can change the rules for…
> it's also a sign that you fear your offering is not competitive enough without the rule change. Agreed. It can't mean anything other than that you can't compete on a fair playing field, so you have to add restrictions to lock customers into your service. That you wrote the service is irrelevant since you licensed it as a gift to the world. It's exactly what Free Software was designed to thwart, and exactly what ope…
But how can you ever have a "fair playing field" when some competitors are a thousand times larger than you?
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#130Inevitable end for every open source company since the free money ended. What bothers me is that wording is vague enough. > HashiCorp considers a competitive offering to be a product or service provided to users or customers outside of your organization that has significant overlap with the capabilities of HashiCorp’s commercial products or services. So, consider there is no cost estimate service and you built a thin…
"Inevitable end for every open source company since the free money ended." I think the only way to prevent this is changing the company charter https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2022-10-preventing-the-bai... "Then after 2 years Terraform Cloud catches up" Really good point, company scopes change.
So if a company is losing money they should just fail with no chance to change direction?