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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#271

Post by deadbunny »

hashtag-til wrote: post #99
kodablah wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work on open source full time. I personally am happy to give my work away unconditionally to both freeloaders and contributors and fortunately my employer feels the same way (I am often a freeloader myself on unrelated projects). Ideally your moneymaker can compete on its own without being dependent upon gatekeeping how the open source part is used. But with project ownership means you can change the rules for…

I find it brave we had this generation of companies creating open-source business models. It’s a shame it didn’t work out for them due to bad actors. The trend I see is for the next generation of good open-source great ideas to be much more protective around their intellectual property. Such a loss, again, due to bad actors.

I consider building a moat on open source contributions (that have to assign their copyright) then closing off to be something a "bad actor" would do.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#272

Post by tedivm »

davorak wrote: post #87
toenail wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abusing the spirit of open source, what? If somebody doesn't want any competitors they should have read the licenses and understood them, and not simply used open source as a buzzword for marketing purposes.

Not having competition is not the problem I have seen listed when abuse is talked about. It is not contributing back in ways that are promotional to how much the company is benefiting. Or not going out of their way to acknowledge that they started with someone else's open source project, not even something like an academic citation.

There are open source licenses, such as the AGPL, which explicitly require that those changes being contributed back. There are licenses which require attribution. The fact the companies switching to the BS License is a sign that those aren't the real issues.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#273

Post by tedivm »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #181

I fully support hashicorp’s prerogative to be paid for their hard work, but I am also glad I did not enter the ecosystem. Looks like it stays k8s + pulumi + ansible for me. I do think they’ll be able to benefit from this though — serious businesses that derive value from their offerings should be comfortable paying more/something for the value they’re receiving.

Pulumi uses Terraform providers under the hood. You're in their ecosystem.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#274

Post by hughesjj »

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.

<3 pulumi

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#275

Post by lijok »

yellowapple wrote: post #17
wmf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like there are companies selling Terraform with a wrapper on top and not paying Hashicorp anything.

I know of precisely zero such companies, and I can't imagine how such a company would even have customers in the first place when Terraform already has a $0 pricetag. I could maybe understand this for Consul or Vault, since those are actual hostable services that could probably be resold - but I don't know of anyone reselling those, either.

Pulumi, scalr, env0, spacelift, digger, controlmonkey, terrateam, terrakube

Dozens of them out there I wonder with great interest which one of these got hashicorp worries about their wallet enough to make this move. Could it be env0 raising 42M earlier this year?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#276

Post by andrewstuart2 »

hughesjj wrote: post #266
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No idea. I contributed 8ish years ago when vault was a significantly smaller project (it was 9mo old at the time) and IIRC there was nothing like hosted hashicorp back then. I just wanted to put into vault a CA keypair I used easyrsa to generate and that didn't work without a good deal more crypto plumbing, and I tried to make it a bit more futureproof while I was there. I had no real idea that 8 years down the road I would be tired of corpo life and tired of having to fight to contribute to OSS and might want to earn money in that sphere.

Today, absolutely. I would simply choose another piece of software to build on and contribute to. Or build my own if I thought something open enough and good enough didn't exist yet.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#277

Post by benatkin »

mdaniel wrote: post #264
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

Now my comment is wrong, haha https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/commit/a7135c000b55fbc2...

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#279

Post by ericb »

nostrebored wrote: post #247
ugh123 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> They should have worked on their value prop.

AWS customers like that there's one bill and one account. Who wants to deal with multiple vendors if they don't have to? It isn't a level playing field when Amazon offers a service.

Amazon could have chosen a cooperative, long-term, strategy and shared some revenue with the authors for some quid-pro-quo, and the world and Amazon, would be better for it. Instead, Amazon chose to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs, now they have to figure it out themselves, and whole ecosystems of services they could have hosted are running away from them.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#280

Post by skybrian »

Example license (for Vagrant) here:

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/main/LICENSE

Looks like it converts to the Mozilla Public License after four years:

> Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License, and the rights granted in the paragraph above terminate.

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