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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#141

Post by yellowapple »

quacker wrote: post #137
yellowapple wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they?

Because that would be a waste of time unless there's some specific case where an existing provider is insufficient.

> Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor.

Pulumi itself is free software, just like Terraform was (and hopefully still is). There is literally nothing stopping Hashicorp from doing the exact same thing in the opposite direction.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#142

Post by madeofpalk »

jamestanderson wrote: post #45
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp? Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects.

> companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects This is not an abuse of FOSS licenses. If developers have a problem with this, there are open source licenses that would make this use case less attractive for Amazon, like the AGPL.

Or, like HashiCorp Adopts Business Source License

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#143

Post by yellowapple »

rnmkr wrote: post #75
yellowapple wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it a lot more attractive, as long as they don't hop on the same BUSL bandwagon.

It's just a matter of time. They're Apache 2.0 for now. But they can pull out at any moment just like Hashicorp, Grafana, Mongo any many others..

Indeed they can. Until they do so, however, I'm inclined to give it a second look.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#145

Post by fishpen0 »

joeduffy wrote: post #122
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…

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 hopefu…

If they think we'll go crawling back to their 100x more expensive 6-7 figure Terraform Enterprise garbage just because we can't use spacelift anymore, then I'll show them the team of engineers we can hire for the same dollars to move the whole stack to pure pulumi or crossplane or the various CDKs

The bald faced disingenuous nature of this change here is wild. They can't compete at their pricing because their pricing is absolutely insane over what the market can bear and they refuse to accept it.

They are going out of their way to make it less expensive to stop using terraform altogether right as so many new options have entered the market

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#146

Post by buzer »

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…

I don't know if they have required old commiters to sign it. I commited to one library that is now under Hashicorp back in 2015 and did not need to sign anything but it was MIT licensed back then. They have also rewritten affected lines as part of larger rewrite.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#147

Post by quacker »

yellowapple wrote: post #141
quacker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Because that would be a waste of time unless there's some specific case where an existing provider is insufficient. > Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor. Pulumi itself is free software, just like Terraform was (and hopefully…

Are you pretending they aren't a competitor profiting off that work though?

Pulumi is free, except you pay for the features that aren't free: https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/. So, Pulumi has grown their directly competing product partially on top of the Terraform ecosystem - and I'd argue they'd be half as successful without reusing Terraform providers - and make money off of that product. It's at least understandable to me that Hashicorp doesn't like this.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#148

Post by _msw_ »

pessimizer wrote: post #138
LambdaComplex wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Disclosure: I work for Amazon, but I've been a copyleft advocate for a quarter century.

Indeed, copyleft can be politically scary. Especially when for-profit companies co-opt copyleft to drive licensing revenue by selling alternative license arrangements [1]. If all those who adopt copyleft licenses pledged to commitment to community-oriented GPL enforcement principles [2] I think that it would be a lot less scary. Unfortunately we've seen "copyleft trolls" that try to wield copyleft as a weapon, either for profit or to make other demands that are not helpful to the community.

Copyleft licenses are, indeed, protective licenses from my perspective. Or, they should be.

An aside, when it comes to "Amazon pulling the rug" -- what exact incident are you referring to?

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

[2] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#149

Post by FridgeSeal »

jamestanderson wrote: post #45
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp? Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects.

> companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects This is not an abuse of FOSS licenses. If developers have a problem with this, there are open source licenses that would make this use case less attractive for Amazon, like the AGPL.

That licence tends to have the dual effect of dissuading otherwise valid users from using it, because a lot of devs and corps see “something something GPL” and just shut down.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#150

Post by gardenfelder »

yellowapple wrote: post #39
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp? Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects.

> Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. That nobody has tried suggests paranoia at best. > Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects. The AGPL exists and already fully addresses that.

I'm thinking that AGPL is, indeed, the Ebola of viral licenses, but it does not cover the case where a large cloud vendor simply takes an AGPL-licensed product and offers it as a cloud service. AGPL does not cover that case. Nothing the cloud vendor does challenges any of the AGPL's terms.

The cloud vendor issue is license agnostic. ElasticSearch comes to mind. For the AGPL side, MongoDB and Neo4J come to mind.

Recall that AGPL came into play by way of a hole in the GPL terms, the one where you can modify a GPL codebase but you don't have to say anything unless you publish it. GPL was weak in therms of the definition of "publish". AGPL closed that hole.

But, that hole only becomes toxic the moment you modify the code or plug proprietary stuff into it. Cloud vendors don't do that.

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