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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#251

Post by andrewstuart2 »

vmatsiiako wrote: post #236
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…

If so, you can check out Infisical ( https://github.com/Infisical/infisical ) as an open source alternative to Vault. The absolute majority of our codebase is licensed under MIT and we have no intentions to change that. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.

I'll definitely check it out. That said, I'm starting to feel a lot more skeptical of the ability for even founders to manage stuff like this. I would say the same of my own OSS as a "founder," but if my company controls it in some way then I'm not sure there's a reasonable way for me to ensure that continues in perpetuity. At least not via a split model like a lot of these recent news stories have revolved around.

From what I've seen of Mitchell as well, at least in the past, I kind of doubt this is something he would have gone through with on his own.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#252

Post by tedivm »

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #23
yellowapple wrote: post #12

> As a result, we believe commercial open source models need to evolve for the ecosystem to continue providing open, freely available software. To imply that a non-open-source license like the BUSL is part of such an evolution of "open source" models (commercial or otherwise) betrays either severe confusion or a deliberate attempt to mislead. Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningful…

> Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp? Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects.

Scalr and Spacelift come to mind.

Spacelift is a significantly better product than Terraform Cloud, and since they apparently can't compete on quality they're going with this instead.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#253

Post by tedivm »

nine_k wrote: post #165
swyx wrote: post #160

> 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…

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.

I wish they'd just use the AGPL then.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#254

Post by quacker »

lijok wrote: post #200
quacker wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but the providers for some of the biggest platforms are maintained by HashiCorp[1] - like the AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes providers[2], and it appears the Pulumi AWS provider (for example) _does_ use the Terraform AWS provider, even to this day[3].

1. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/registry/providers... - "official" providers are maintained by HashiCorp

2. https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers?tier=official - The filtered list of "official" providers maintained by HashiCorp

3. https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/tree/008c4360bc9fc24303... - Just prove it to myself, I can see the `upstream` git submodule, which embeds pulumi/terraform-provider-aws, which is a fork of hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws, although the repo was not created as a fork in Github, so it is not marked as a "fork" and so I have to compare commit histories to tell that it is a fork.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#255

Post by ploxiln »

Galanwe wrote: post #232
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…

Why? "Open source" has a clear meaning: the source code is open. It does not imply that the source is free to see, free to modify or free to fork. I'm pro open source, but I also have no problem that said source is not copyable, redistributable, etc. To me open source is about _knowledge_ of how something is done. Period.

There's a pretty good Open Source definition that's over 20 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

"Business Source License" is not Open Source. You don't have to release your software as Open Source if you don't want to, I certainly write a lot of non-open-source software for a living. But people/companies want to take advantage of the good-will/reputation that comes from calling their software Open Source, and associating it with really Open Source software, without really making it Open Source. That's sleazy.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#256

Post by deadbunny »

jen20 wrote: post #209
trashburger wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will be fun to do a search on the next release of Terraform for code which I have written while not under contract with HashiCorp (I am still the #8 all time contributor according to GitHub, despite not having worked on it since ~2017-8, when non-employed maintainers were summarily removed from projects by a middle manager). I have not and will not sign anything which assigns copyright for OSS (even to the FSF), s…

Genuine Question. If it hasn't what is your recourse? I can't see a PR to remolve all your commits being accepted (even if it should be).

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#257

Post by johannes1234321 »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #207
ignoramous wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a metaphorical eternity, not a literal eternity. Four years ago is 2019; I use plenty of software from then. And if I understand the license correctly, you're perfectly free to use the software in your own open-source projects, and your commercial projects unless they're a re-packaging of Hashicorp's own, etc. We shouldn't act like this is an evil business decision, or like this is morally equivalent to propriet…

Four years u patched with pote trial security issues? Probably depending on four year old libraries which are annoying to get, based on build.tooling which is outdated ...

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#258

Post by tedivm »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #249
TheRealPomax wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just because they have the legal right doesn't make it ethical, and even if someone makes the argument that it is ethical that doesn't change that it's a bit of a slap in the face to the open source community. You're allowed to be annoyed by this.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#259

Post by rcme »

pseudalopex wrote: post #221
falcolas wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then, according to the meaning you are assigning these words, Windows must be open source. Which, of course, is obviously false. Which means the words have different meaning than what you ascribe to them. Source available means you can view the source code, by abiding to the terms the owner of the code sets. Closed source means you can’t change or redistribute that source, regardless of whether you are allowed t…

Windows would be not open source and not closed source according to them. I think most people would call it closed source however.

It’s obviously a spectrum, but (some) people think of different things when they hear “closed source” vs. “source available”. Also, a company like Microsoft providing source to big customers doesn’t make their products source available, at least not in the commonly understood way. Source available usually means the source is freely available for reading and often compiling. That obviously does not apply to Windows.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#260

Post by Aeolun »

quacker wrote: post #147
yellowapple wrote: post #141

Earlier 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…

Is there anything stopping Hashicorp from implementing their own pulumi backend and profiting off the pulumi client?

I kind of feel that this is the point of open source. That the work one group of people does can be leveraged by all of humanity.

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