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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#211

Post by rnmkr »

nezirus wrote: post #24

Dunno 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.

> where these companies would be if their software was under non free license from the start.

Yep open source is used as a marketing. I doubt they'd gain much adoption if it started with BSL at first place.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#212

Post by bombcar »

ignoramous wrote: post #190
PoignardAzur wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think what you say is factually correct, but maybe misrepresents the situation a bit. The license automatically converts to full open-source after 4 years. Maybe this isn't ideal, but it isn't "big company takes your code and locks it away forever…

4 years is an eternity in software; a slap on the face, it isn't a concession.

As a starting point it’s a great line; rather than closed source have something that worst case you can use in four years.

As a restriction added to something previously open, it’s horrendous. AGPL would be better.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#213

Post by scarby2 »

klardotsh wrote: post #131
FridgeSeal wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Quar…

Fiduciary responsibility isn't entirely about returns, it's about the best interests of the investors. And if you've invested in a company with a certain mission it would be said to be in your interests for that mission to continue.

If I were starting a business these days I'd be tempted to found it on the basis that 60% must be owned by employees of the company until the last living descendant of king Charles dies.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#214

Post by randmeerkat »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #167

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…

> That's pretty disappointing.

From the article: “End users can continue to copy, modify, and redistribute the code for all non-commercial and commercial use, except where providing a competitive offering to HashiCorp.”

Literally nothing has changed, this isn’t disappointing, it’s smart, they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#215

Post by jen20 »

lucasfcosta wrote: post #161

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?

The cloud platform is not and never has been open source.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#217

Post by mqus »

> 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.

Vendors like Hashicorp, that take advantage of contributors who give away their work(PRs) under the MPL, only to then have this work relicensed to a different license?

Hashicorp could just request the source code from those "vendors" (after all, the MPL has copyleft) and integrate their changes. (They have to be users first but this shouldn't be that big of a problem).

I wonder who the freeloader really is. CLAs should not be accepted. Ever.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#218

Post by jen20 »

ris wrote: post #184
hardwaresofton wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write them for Pulumi!

Firstly I don't have any particular faith in them either given their business model appears to be sending them towards a similar path. Secondly, I think encouraging people to write their infra configuration in a general purpose imperative language is quite possibly the worst idea I've ever encountered. As botched an attempt Hashicorp made at designing HCL, they at least had the good sense to make it declarative.

> I think encouraging people to write their infra configuration in a general purpose imperative language is quite possibly the worst idea I've ever encountered.

Good news: Pulumi is also entirely declarative. The model is what matters in this regard, not the syntax used to express it.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#219

Post by Rapzid »

kodablah wrote: post #42
adoxyz wrote: post #5

Nothing wrong with this imo. I actually hope more open source projects start with a business source license if their ultimate goal is to become a SaaS platform. I think we've seen time and time again large enterprises abusing the spirit of open source for their own monetary gain, contributing nothing back, and just acting in bad faith.

> abusing the spirit of open source for their own monetary gain For many, the spirit of open source is to allow it to be used in any way, commercially or otherwise. I don't consider it acting in bad faith at all to use what's out there and made available, and I am happy to give things away as in beer. Otherwise it's not open source (which is also fine, not all software has to be open source). To abuse the spirit of o…

Open Source is poorly defined. All the most popular "open source" licenses are restrictive. The restrictions are what differentiates them. Hell, look at GPL..

It's a spectrum IMHO from closed-source to "do whatever you want" source.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#220

Post by lijok »

A1kmm wrote: post #98

I don't know if I've ever seen so many useful Open Source software products go proprietary at once; Vault, Consul, Terraform are all useful parts of many people's stacks, that they chose specifically because of their licence. Hopefully they all get forked (or existing forks take off), and it is just a matter of the community converging on the winner that we all use in the future.

Not possible, at least for vault and terraform The way the architecture works, any fork would have an impossible task to take off and maintain compatibility
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