It's funny/sad that they require Terraform providers to be FOSS.
HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
191–200 of 760 posts
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#192> 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…
> indeed i just saw a startup demo today show off a feature that they admitted was just Vault in a wrapper (they even called their thing Vault haha) and that was it, but i would not have thought Hashicorp would mind them at all (its a very new startup)
What about all the cloud providers with their own Vault offering, which is likely just Hashicorp's FOSS Vault with lipstick and other bells/whistles?
People are paying good money for Secrets Management, and probably not to HashiCorp (directly or indirectly). If your cloud provider offers a turn-key solution and it's priced right, why would you bother with an external 3rd party?
HashiCorp recently rolled out a "Free Tier" to their HCP service[1]. They're clearly trying to get more people to use their first-party services.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Recal…
Cloud providers build a proprietary control plane to deploy copies of the program and it could be argued that such code is a modification of the program itself and thus has to be released. That's why they won't touch AGPL code.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#194Dunno about others, but I always ask myself where these companies would be if their software was under non free license from the start. This is hostile to end users, small people an companies, not just big megacorps wanting the "steal" the code and run it as a service. Be successful in running and using Hashicorp's software, and they decide to shut you down if you are deemed a competitor.
From what I know about BSL, nothing changes for me, except some notion what "true open source spirit" is and what not.
Depends on the conditions of the BSL and whether your legal department is OK with them.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#195Earlier 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…
Can I ask where Pulumi gets revenue from? (Honest question first time I have heard of you, quick look seems to be a CentOS for hashicorp ?) I love the ethos of open source and have spoken at and helped run conferences, and had the pleasure of being paid to develop it - but the productivity I had when paid ten hours a day to work on OSS compared to whenever I get a chance between work family and everything else, well,…
I am a paying Pulumi user. Their tool integrates with a cloud platform and we pay per resource managed by Pulumi.
Pulumi is one of several products where I like that it’s open source in case I need to move off their cloud, but hope that I don’t have to (Plausible is another).
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#196At 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.
Literally just don't sign CLAs. I made the mistake of signing a CLA for a piece of software which shortly after switched to a non-Free license, and will never ever sign a CLA again.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
You, humanitec, and env0 should start a community fork of pre-BSL Terraform and donate it to the CNCF.
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're free to decide open source isn't working for you. (Well, assuming you're not using any open source software that has decided on viral licenses because that's the payment _they_ expect) You're not free to decide your source available model is open source and reap the marketing benefits of open source without the costs.
I think these projects should just dual license as AGPL and BPL/EPL. That way all the "it's not really technically open source" complainers couldn't day that its not technically open source. It wouldnt substantively change anything of course, but that's somewhat the point. BPL/EPL/SSPL was always fully within the spirit of open source, it just pissed off the same large corporations who also can't stand the AGPL.
I'm way more fine with AGPL (without CLA). That's perfectly within the spirit of open source, as it doesn't privilege one group of users over another.
BPL, EPL, SSPL are all "not open source", and AGPL+CLA is "we're setting up for a bait and switch with not open source versions".
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#199At 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.
There are many projects that are managed by foundations, like the Apache Foundation, FSF, Linux Foundation, etc. Those projects aren't backed by any one corporate entity.
Aside from that, there's still value in contributing to a product you're consuming at your day job: not having to maintain forks. If you can get your feature into the upstream project, less work for you in the long run, it's a win win.
Should you contribute to corporate owned projects in your free time for the fun of it? Probably not, unless you think it will earn you some kind of recognition (resume fodder).
Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 understandabl…
Most TF providers are not maintained by Hashicorp, but by the company whose product the provider integrates into. Development of the provider is an investment the company makes to lower CAC.