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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#261

Post by tedivm »

paulgb wrote: post #195
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Plausible is amazing, I love it. I moved off of another platform that started as open source and then went closed source, but Plausible ended up being a better platform over all anyways.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#262

Post by ris »

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.

This doesn't wash. The DOM is a declarative model, but that doesn't mean that a javascript program can't be a horror story of side effects and improperly grasped execution order.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#263

Post by mdaniel »

rnmkr wrote: post #211
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.

> I doubt they'd gain much adoption if it started with BSL at first place

Adoption is one risk, https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/graphs/contributors is an entirely different risk

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#264

Post by mdaniel »

benatkin wrote: post #164

Since Vagrant is currently under the MIT license rather than the MPL, does that mean it won't be changed? It says "All Products".

You are misinformed: https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/main/LICENSE

I actually went to look that up because "who, exactly, are they envisioning making a hosted copy of Vagrant?!" FFS

I hope these contributors yank their PRs https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/pulls

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#265

Post by Operyl »

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 am absolutely a huge fan of your company providing 30 minute walk throughs of the codebase for new contributors, I have never seen that before!

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#266

Post by hughesjj »

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…

So, I don't understand -- had you known that this license change to prevent competitor use of their product, would you not have bothered to add the functionality you contributed?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#267

Post by lijok »

hashtag-til wrote: post #4

I’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.

It is, by definition, impossible to use and not contribute. To use is to contribute. As soon as you install a Hashicorp product, before you even run it, you have already contributed.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#268

Post by PoachedEggs »

mfer wrote: post #111
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for. High level, times have changed. Source should be (my two cents, ymmv) about a mutually beneficial partnership between builders and users, not “give it all away for free or you’re not legit.” Users get to understand and extend what they’re running (via source), while the project steward/maintainer/owner can continue to do so. It is a balance to be…

Looking at the public data [1], Hashicorp looses money every quarter. At some point they need to stop burning cash because they have yet to figure out how to run a sustainable business. I don't know enough about their operations to have good suggestions on how to become sustainable. But, I don't like this move. There are many sustainable open source companies. Moving to source available from open source will likely n…

> There are many sustainable open source companies.

What are some examples?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#270

Post by Aeolun »

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.

Not really. The big question in infra land at our company these days is terraform vs cdk vs pulumi.
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