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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#131

Post by klardotsh »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #110
LambdaComplex wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

I hate to say it but this feels inevitable. We've accepted that the requirement (legally!) of a public company is to deliver the maximum possible returns to investors, and as such, employees become a cost center to optimize away, and just generally, anything that negatively impacts the quarterly report must be eliminated, even if that thing is the only thing that will keep the next quarterly report in the black.

Quarterly scope for fiscal data is one of the most short-sighted decisions humans have ever done. Expecting quarterly up-and-to-the-right, where simple sustenance is not enough, but profit must grow quarterly, on a planet with finite resources in an economy with finite money, is a guaranteed, zero-exceptions, recipe for failure, by definition.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#132

Post by pessimizer »

kdmccormick wrote: post #14
webmobdev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want "free"loaders using your software why is it "free" in the first place?

Because they want it to be developed collaboratively, in the public eye, and for the good of all contributors. In other words, free as in freedom, but not free as in beer.

> In other words, free as in freedom, but not free as in beer.

That's the Free Software slogan, not open source. The only relationship between the two is that open source can easily be relicensed into Free Software (or proprietary, or whatever.)

There's nothing in open source about friendliness or collaborative development. I'm not forced to take your advice or contributions just because I'm open source, so how could that have anything to do with it?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#133

Post by wmf »

peppermint_gum wrote: post #36

It is important to understand that there are two kinds of open-source software: - Software made by startups that are precious to HN. In this case, building a business on top of them is "freeloading" and it's deeply immoral. Examples: Elastic, HashiCorp, Mongo - "Public good software", there's nothing wrong with profiting from it, in fact, it's encouraged. Examples: Linux, Postgres, Nginx, Apache

Or another way to look at it: software that volunteers can't/won't develop and thus will only exist if a company can sustain itself vs. software that volunteers can and will develop.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#134

Post by klardotsh »

riku_iki wrote: post #113
klardotsh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 but they are not saying they will be adding new files under business license keeping old files under MPL, they are saying future releases of products will be shipped under business license.

Well, sorry, I was responding to what I'd assumed was the parent comment talking about what would happen in a forked-Terraform world. The original Terraform project as maintained by Hashicorp is using its rights under the CLAs they required signatures for to fully relicense going forward, yes, that's correct (to my reading).

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#135

Post by pessimizer »

kdmccormick wrote: post #80
madeofpalk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want people/companies to contribute back, why volunteer your code under a license that doesn't require that?

"Why did I leave Halloween candy on my porch if I wasn't okay with one jerk kid taking all of it for himself?" Because projects believ(ed) that the good will of their users would be enough to sustain their projects and businesses. Now that certain projects see that good will isn't working, they're switching to the legal system.

Open source licenses are the legal system. They're licenses. Changing your license isn't "switching to the legal system."

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#137

Post by quacker »

yellowapple wrote: post #58
jrsdav wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked to see what licenses are involved, but Pulumi makes liberal use of Terraform providers[1]. And I would definitely consider them to be a Hashicorp competitor. [1]: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/vs/terraform/#:~:text=U... . > Pulumi is able to adapt any Terraform Provider for use with Pulumi, enabling management of any infrastructure supported by the Terraform Providers ecosystem using Pulumi pr…

TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs - and the vast majority ain't even developed by Hashicorp in the first place. If Pulumi - another open-source infra-as-code tool (that ain't even a fork of any Hashicorp product AFAICT) - is really the thing scaring Hashicorp away from open source, then that doesn't really do Hashicorp any favors here.

> TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs

If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#138

Post by pessimizer »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #65
webmobdev wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it is a question of choosing the right license - AGPL.

Yeah, it always confuses me when people release something under e.g. the BSD or MIT license and then complain about "freeloaders." It's totally understandable to not want companies to profit off of proprietary, closed-source forks of your software. I get it! But there are licenses that you can use to stop that from ever happening (namely [A]GPL). Why not use one of those?

It's because a lot of them were culturally anti-copyleft, but had never read the licenses or the reasons behind them.

Copyleft is politically scary to some people, so they refuse to acknowledge it other than to call people zealots. Explicit licenses protect you. Open source spirits don't. Everyone should be honest: the only reason a lot of people prefer open source is because they want to preserve a rug-pull option. Then they get surprised with it's Amazon pulling the rug on them.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#139

Post by davorak »

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…

> This is purely a way for HashiCorp to ensure they are the only ones who can commercialize these formerly open source projects. Which is fine. But just go closed source, then, and own that, instead of trying to have it both ways.

Pragmatically I would rather bsl than closed source and I am more likely to use a product that is bsl, with reasonable transfer time and license, than a 100% closed source product.

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