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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#301

Post by koolba »

metadat wrote: post #293

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 relev…

Does anybody even pay for terraform? Outside the “workspace” hosted product, it’s all free as in beer for all the providers.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#302

Post by Aeolun »

ris wrote: post #262
jen20 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but you still end up with a DOM afterwards, and you can compare that against a different DOM to determine differences.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#303

Post by mdaniel »

candiddevmike wrote: post #191

It's funny/sad that they require Terraform providers to be FOSS.

I was curious to find where they said that, and the specifics, and the closest I came was https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials/provider... which just states

> To release and publish the HashiCups provider to the Terraform Registry, you must publicly host the source code in a GitHub repository you own.

without the FOSS part. Do you have a different link?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#304

Post by hughesjj »

Aeolun wrote: post #260
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…

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.

I've always seen open source as more of a spectrum. On one extreme, you have gpl3 stuff coming from the church of GNU itself. Moving up the spectrum you have stuff like the Linux kernel or certain CNCF projects, which can be used in proprietary distributions etc. Above that you'll have company specific licenses like the Amazon software license or whatever hashicorp+elastic are doing these days. At some point you're with RHEL where you need to sign a license to get their source, and above that you're signing ndas, and above that its closed source, and above that they're cryptographically obfuscating their source code with anti reverse engineering licensing.

I appreciate open source in all it's forms, as it's so much easier to 1. Read the code in case of a bug or just to understand your dependencies better, 2. Many of the semi closed licenses still allow you to learn things like syntax for GitHub actions or do analytics or whatever, which is still more value than an entirely closed system, and 3. It allows me to reproduce binaries and independently audit security.

That said, I'm worried about a tragedy of the commons situation. I'm not a fan of capitalism, but at the end of the day I can't pay for housing or taxes in clout or goodwill, and the only way I see likely to both attract talent and survive is one which works within the system while sacrificing their principles as little as possible. These wonderful engineers at elastic and hashicorp and pulumi and every other company mentioned in this thread need to eat.

I'm not saying I have an answer, but I am saying that I respect and understand why companies like elastic and hashicorp are resorting to drastic measures. If the choice is between either of those companies going under or having their source code come with a little bit more restrictions, I'd chose the latter. I'd much rather them have a noncompete clause in their license than have them just shut the window into their source code altogether.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#305

Post by 38 »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #228
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.

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…

> I've been hacking on and off for a couple years on a side project I'd like to monetize

OK so you want to use their software, make money off it, and give nothing back.

if thats the case, you cant do that any more. you can either stick to personal use, or purchase a commercial license from them.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#307

Post by jchw »

randmeerkat wrote: post #214
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…

> 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.

>Literally nothing has changed.

Uhm, yeah, something DID change: the license and terms. I don't understand what kind of argument this is.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#308

Post by hughesjj »

deadbunny wrote: post #248
manojlds wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And SAM, and controltower, and of course the aforementioned cdk

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#309

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

Quick reminder that open source is not a business model. If you can't compete on service, you will always end up doing this to try to slow down your competitors.

On an unrelated note, I've always loathed their antagonistic approach to users and hope their company dies so the industry can standardize on less crappy cloud configuration management tool. But unfortunately incumbents take a very long time to defeat.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#310

Post by andrewstuart2 »

38 wrote: post #305
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…

> I've been hacking on and off for a couple years on a side project I'd like to monetize OK so you want to use their software, make money off it, and give nothing back. if thats the case, you cant do that any more. you can either stick to personal use, or purchase a commercial license from them.

Seems like you missed the part where I literally typed "giving back." Or that I literally contributed part of the hashicorp codebase, specifically vault. And it's been hard continuing to do that at $DAYJOB consistently, so I've hacked on a side project in my spare time (also open sourcing plenty of useful tools during that hacking) as a means to the end of eventually finding ways to keep giving back directly and teaching others to do the same.
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