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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#241

Post by geerlingguy »

CrLf wrote: post #229

Over the years, I think most people came to understand "open source" as something closer to "free software". However, that's clearly not the case for projects controlled by a single entity that require copyright assignments from contributors. Copyright assignments are put in place for exactly this (allowing a single entity to relicense the whole codebase unilaterally based on their own interests), and we should maybe…

This is one of the Corporate Open Source anti-patterns Bryan Cantrill mentions in his talk a number of years ago: https://youtu.be/Pm8P4oCIY3g

It always feels scummy having to assign copyright for my own contributions to a big company.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#242

Post by Macha »

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.

Also, "What if their dependencies adopted the same attitude?"

Like https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/main/go.mod#L25

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#243

Post by wlonkly »

INTPenis wrote: post #170

License ethics discussion aside, this is going to cause mayhem! :D I know of at least one massive global company using vault in production, for free as a backend to their own password manager frontend. My own $dayjob was just going to set it up actually, I guess we'll have to re-evaluate that now. I can't even imagine how many companies use vault in production.

But the license prohibits competitive use, not commercial use, right? So using Vault in production is no problem if you're using it as part of the infrastructure of a company that isn't competing with Hashicorp.

Using it as a backend for a password manager... more of a grey area, but Hashicorp doesn't offer a password manager.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#244

Post by hardwaresofton »

jen20 wrote: post #218
ris wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perfectly put.

To add to this, having the full expressive power of a programming language for syntax is the way to go. When you have to add explicit looping in your DSL, it’s time to not use a DSL.

HCL is my least favorite part of the hashicorp ecosystem.

Also it’s not like you have to take my word for it — the trend towards CDKs shows that pulumis approach was right. They were just early

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#245

Post by wlonkly »

danw1979 wrote: post #103
bithavoc wrote: post #18

I wonder how this affects Pulumi

Your line of thinking was that Pulumi uses terraform providers under the hood, right ? It’s a good question. I suspect several forks might be happening as we speak.

I believe providers are still OSS-licensed.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#246

Post by vmatsiiako »

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…

I'm a huge fan of Pulumi. After HCP's license switch, I'm even more sure that Pulumi will be a clear winner over Terraform in the long term.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#247

Post by nostrebored »

ugh123 wrote: post #230
randmeerkat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> they’re protecting themselves against cloud providers that have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the open source community. e.g. AWS -> Elasticsearch.

Absurd. Providing a managed instance of open source software that’s complicated to manage is fine. It’s not AWS’s fault that Elastic did a bad job of selling into AWS accounts. They should have worked on their value prop.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#248

Post by deadbunny »

manojlds wrote: post #151
arianvanp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don't out-compete them in any shape or form. I'd call it healthy competition. Pulumi made Hashicorp build Terraform CDK. Which is a great result. And the only reason Hashicorp was able to build CDK quickly is because they built it on top of Amazon's open source Amazon CDK. Another competitor.

Calling Amazon a competitor because they have CDK is ridiculous.

Amazon is a competitor due to CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, however many ways to run containers there are now...

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#249

Post by andrewstuart2 »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #238
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you missed my last sentence. I've been hacking on and off for a couple years on a side project I'd like to monetize, to capture some of my value add, while also giving back. (It's sorta "if you build it they will come" at this point tbh so I don't necessarily expect it to work). My project is sort of "OSS platform as a service" only I just deploy it for you and teach you to run it yourself, while jumping on a c…

But your contributions stopped being "your" contributions the moment you signed off on them being merged into the vault codebase. Why would they owe you anything when you already indicated you were cool with the fact that you didn't want anything in return by contributing? This change protects the project from getting outright shut down because huge companies use it to extract value without some of that value going i…

I guess you can chalk that up to naivety on my part. I've always assumed there is a social contract on top of the CLA I probably signed, that the software I wrote would continue to be available and maintained via contributions from both the company and community. And since they very obviously benefit from a plethora of OSS themselves, including the language they've used to build their products and the platforms they undoubtedly run on.

I guess I'm always free to fork the codebase I care about under its current license and try to build a community around that. But I think we all know that's not as viable.

Anyway, I'll just be reconsidering my use of software open sourced by companies, I guess, regardless of how permissively it's licensed. The free lunches I thought we collectively agreed were awesome and ought to keep helping each other provide, are apparently ending as money gets tight.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#250

Post by Aeolun »

vmatsiiako wrote: post #246
joeduffy wrote: post #122

Earlier 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…

I'm a huge fan of Pulumi. After HCP's license switch, I'm even more sure that Pulumi will be a clear winner over Terraform in the long term.

I really don’t think that was ever in doubt. You only need to use it for a very short time to find that the ergonomics are infinitely nicer than Terraform.
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