HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

It’s really interesting when someone takes contributions under the MPL license for years only to relicense later under a restrictive license.

IMO they should just avoid open-sourcing the cloud platform if they want to sell it.

Also, why not just have gone with GPL since the beginning to at least benefit from the repackaging too?

Luckily I've just remembered I don't need to maintain or contribute to terraform providers anymore.

Why, quite clearly:

> Organizations providing competitive offerings to HashiCorp will no longer be permitted to use the community edition products free of charge under our BSL license. Commercial licensing terms are available and can enable use cases beyond the BSL limitations.

Looks to me very similar to (A)GPL + commercial dual licensing, for instance.

That's pretty disappointing. I personally haven't used much beyond vault (I've used but not enjoyed or built anything on terraform), but this is pretty diametrically opposed to what I appreciated most about hashicorp products. Heck, I've even contributed a chunk of the code I use the most from vault (Cert management) and now I'm going to have to reevaluate whether I can attempt to use that service for customers going forward, and whether I will contribute ever again.

It definitely feels like the whole era of VC drying up is bringing out the worst possible future for some of these non GPL/similar licenses. Which is unfortunate for any of us who have deliberately learned only OSS and operations around it, giving back the whole time, with dreams of building services that leverage that knowledge someday as a chance to be our own boss while also utilizing and giving back to the OSS that got us this far.

Boost Software License 1.0 - BSL-1.0 [0]

Business Source License 1.1 - BUSL-1.1 [1]

0. https://spdx.org/licenses/BSL-1.0.html

1. https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html