At this point if you are actively spending time and effort contributing to any open source project while not being affiliated with (and getting paid by) the company that manages it, know that you are being taken for a ride. Your contributions are eventually going to be moved under a non-open license so the company in question can secure their revenue stream and you can do nothing about it.
HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
171–180 of 760 posts
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#172I’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.
> not contributing back Have you ever looked at the number of unreviewed PRs on Hashicorp projects?
Reviewing those PRs require engineer time from a HashiCorp employee - how many resources should be diverted to it?
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#173It’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?
> On a specified Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of the code under the BSL, whichever comes first, the code automatically becomes available under the Change License. Our current Change License for HashiCorp projects is MPL 2.0.
I wonder if whatever MPL 2.0-licensed contributions were made less than 4 years ago.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's where dual-licensing comes in like Artifex' AGPL + commercial licensing. But yes, most large Tech companies have a blanket ban on AGPL.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not contributing back Have you ever looked at the number of unreviewed PRs on Hashicorp projects?
Reviewing those PRs require engineer time from a HashiCorp employee - how many resources should be diverted to it?
> Reviewing those PRs require engineer time from a HashiCorp employee
No it doesn't. There's nothing stopping them delegating that task to community members apart from the desire to retain corporate control.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Spacelift co-founder here - please don’t panic. We will make sure you can continue to use Spacelift :)
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#177[deleted]
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#178> Why is HashiCorp making this change? > > We strongly believe in the value of openly sharing source code and enabling practitioners to solve their problems, building communities, and creating transparency. HashiCorp provides feature-rich products to the community for free, and that development is made possible by our commercial customers who partner with us. By shifting to this license, HashiCorp can better manage c…
because there's a contention between the people developing the software and the startup community.
it's obvious that for a company (money-making entity), that they're going to want to have a monopoly in providing the software aaS. That's the monetization strategy on otherwise free software.
I don't think this is surprising. We saw this years ago with AWS and MongoDB. Yes, a startup can offer Vault cheaper since they don't have to pay for developers to build the software, and, in fact, they get to offshore their support costs to the developing company too ("yay" OSS).
I don't like it, but for a corporation that is trying to develop OSS, it makes perfect sense.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#179At this point if you are actively spending time and effort contributing to any open source project while not being affiliated with (and getting paid by) the company that manages it, know that you are being taken for a ride. Your contributions are eventually going to be moved under a non-open license so the company in question can secure their revenue stream and you can do nothing about it.
Or, unlike closed products, you're getting to bet on a product that can be made to the way you need it to, as literally as possible.
Think how difficult it is to get most companies to listen to your needs, much less ship what you need, versus being able to contribute your own pull request and have it merged.
Why should this mean the source owner deserves any less of a product revenue than the company that won't let you add your own features? It shouldn't.
If you get your feature merged at the long end of a customer relationship / product manager interaction, do you expect that means you should get paid for your feature request or get to keep it? If you write the spec for your feature in code instead of a PowerPoint or Word doc, so it does what you need exactly right, you're still asking them to ship a feature you need, just better specified and delivered sooner. It lowers the overhead both firms waste, which lowers your licensing cost and your cost of delay.
From the viewpoint of a CTO of a mega enterprise -- a vendor that lets me make things work is worth more per month to me than a vendor that won't, and no, I don't expect my enterprise get paid for the vendor accepting the fix that scratches my particular itch.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#180I’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.
In this case in particular, their stuff was under MPL (which has copyleft). If there were other companies offering Hashicorp services with hasicorp software, they also are under the obligation to open-source their changes under the MPL to their users, so hashicorp could get back those "contributions" from "freeloaders".
On the other hand, many contributions(PRs) that hashicorp got (for free) are now relicensed to a different license. Who's actually the freeloader here?