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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#291

Post by scarface_74 »

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…

Opposite anecdote, I know a few SAs at AWS who contribute to Terraform.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#292

Post by deadbunny »

wlonkly wrote: post #243
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.

But what if they do in X years? Suddenly that company is out of compliance with the BSL.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#293

Post by metadat »

Funny how @mitchellh has decided not to join the conversation. Pretty sure he had the ultimate input on this decision, and historically he's engaged with HN directly. Hmm.

Overall it seems like a loser move. Look what happened to Elasticsearch - to me and most others, ES no longer exists. I've happily moved on to OpenSearch and not looked back at poor kimchi. Due to their own actions, Elasticsearch is no longer relevant.

Will Hashicorp's move spur a similar effort to fork the last open-source license version of Terraform and other Hashicorp tools? What other choice is there when the creator gets petty and insecure, and goes hostile against the open source community that helped create it? Extremely disappointed with the Hashicorp leadership team. MitchellH and your little sidekick Armon Dadgar - you owe your community better than this.

I interviewed with Hashicorp back in 2016 and ended up turning down the job. I used to have a small amount of regret about this decision, but now that true colors have been revealed, I know I made the right call.

What's that saying about trust?

Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.

It's surprising to learn that people I thought were so smart could turn out to be this dumb!

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#294

Post by [deleted] »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #251
vmatsiiako wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. F…

[deleted]

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#295

Post by Aeolun »

api wrote: post #206
version_five wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand this attitude. Are some people contributing to open source principally for a kind of quid-pro-quo? I think it's nice when people contribute back, but it's certainly not a motivation for me to open source stuff - other than to set an example. People can do what they want with the software, that's the whole point. Full disclosure, I'm a shitty open source contributor, but I have some projects on g…

It's not so much quid-pro-quo as freedom. I like creating open source to give users freedom, not to contribute to billion dollar companies jailing everyone's data in SaaS and creating a surveillance dystopia.

So it’s about freedom, but not when applied to billion dollar companies?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#296

Post by quacker »

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…

I'm very curious about this. I imagine HashiCorp has lawyers that are quite confident in the license change. IANAL, but I'd guess that the BSL is chosen in particular because it is somehow compatible with MPL in a legal sense? Or because, after 4 years, the license "degrades" into the MPL which gives them a loophole or such? I'm very interested if someone knows.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#297

Post by Aeolun »

jen20 wrote: post #223
comprev wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviewing those PRs require engineer time from a HashiCorp employee - how many resources should be diverted to it?

It need not be HashiCorp employees. I merged as many (if not more) PRs into Terraform after leaving as I did while working there - the notion of community maintainers was nixed in 2018, though that was never communicated.

They actively decided against free labor? Wow.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#298

Post by j1elo »

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…

The huge difference is where the copyright of the code lays. OSS projects that require contributors to assign their copyright away, should not be trusted, and should not receive goodwill contributions to begin with. Otherwise, what today is Apache 2.0, tomorrow can become Commercial, while asking nobody for permission, because the maintainers have ownership of 100% of the code.

Not that OSS projects backed by commercial-driven entities usually receive any meaningful amount of contributions from external people... but still, an important detail to think about OSS.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#299

Post by scarface_74 »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #55
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…

Based on multiple previous employers of mine, it seems like software companies start noticeably going downhill about 1.5 years after they go public. Let's check Wikipedia and see how I did: > On 29 November 2021, HashiCorp set terms for its IPO ...I'm starting to think I'm onto something. (I do welcome anecdata that either helps or hurts my hypothesis)

How many of those companies were profitable before going public?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#300

Post by Galanwe »

ploxiln wrote: post #255
Galanwe wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

It does definitely count as open source.

I don't care what a California-based "Open Source Initiative" group try to define as "Open Source Definition". That is all lobbying to me.

If I can see the source, then it's open source. The rest is just play on words which only purpose is to entertain sterile debates of zealot groups attempting vocabulary appropriation in a power struggle.

I don't want to fuel these groups' debates around "free software" vs "open source", Linux vs GNU/Linux or whatnot.

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