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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#311

Post by metadat »

koolba wrote: post #301
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.

Irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, at this scale of developer community it's all about mindshare. They could've created a compelling paid support or other product offerings, but haven't, or maybe took too much funding and the VCs forced their hand. Regardless, it's a 1-trick pony. Even though they have other cool shit, Terraform is the golden goose, and they just strangled it.

Now someone will fork it to "Terrafoam" or whatever and that'll be it. MitchellH's vision and expertise is no longer critical to the project.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#312

Post by lolinder »

scarface_74 wrote: post #291
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…

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

This anecdote is a lot less interesting, both because of the separation (you know some people vs they run a company with direct exposure) and lack of detail. I'm sure you do know some people who contribute, but you haven't given any details about their experience that would contradict OP's claim that contributing is hard.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#313

Post by CrLf »

dragonwriter wrote: post #240
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…

IF they have a license that meets the Open Source Definition, the fact that someone has the right (whether its a single owner is the only committer to the main project, or a person or entity who requires copyright assignment before merging outside submissions) has the right to subsequently issue versions with a different license does not change that. So, no, I don’t see a CLA for an otherwise open source project tran…

> And, if it did, we’d have to have a serious conversation about the “or any later version” clause of the GPL and how it makes all software using it not open source.

I was referring to people's understanding of what open source stands for, not what it actually means.

However, I can say that I personally dislike the fact that GNU projects require copyright assignments too, and that they were able to relicense all their projects from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv3 or later" unilaterally. I'm more willing to give the FSF that blank check than commercial entities, though.

Also, the "or any later version" means the recipient (user) chooses, not any single controlling entity.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#314

Post by seneca »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59
version_five wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for That sounds like what the GP comment is saying. If someone said "turns out open source doesn't work for our business model" it's hard to argue with. If instead they talk about "evolving open source models" and whatnot, it feels like they want the best of both worlds. It's been happening a lot recently that companies pretend they are "open sourci…

I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means out of survival. Source available is the new open source, and what young technologists will grow up grinding on. You’ll have folks complain about it during the transition (as happens with any Overton window sort of event), but they’ll move on eventually and a new crop of tech industry will grow up with this as the new normal. Change is inevitable, broadly sp…

This is what these companies want you to believe, that it's a fait accompli and you just have to accept it. That's not actually reality, and giving up words and communities to people who want to corrupt them is not the right reaction.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#315

Post by unknownian »

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…

>like the AGPL?

As I explained in an earlier thread, MongoDB tried using AGPL. AGPL is not a barrier for Amazon, they still will resell your product without contributing. MongoDB ended up using a variant of AGPL that is even stricter (requiring the entire tech stack to be under the same license) but is no longer considered FOSS. Until the attitude changes around what FOSS is, this will keep happening.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#316

Post by jkodroff »

quacker wrote: post #254
lijok wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/pro…

The Pulumi Kubernetes provider is a native provider. It does not take a TF provider as a dependency. Instead, it works directly based off the k8s API spec.

The Google TF provider is actually maintained by Google via Magic Modules, a single source for both TF and Ansible . The generated TF provider does reside in HashiCorp’s GH org tho.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#317

Post by CrLf »

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.

The word "open" has pretty broad implications and only one of those implications is "visible". It's pretty reasonable to expect more from "open source" than just the source being visible.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#318

Post by JoshTriplett »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59
version_five wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for That sounds like what the GP comment is saying. If someone said "turns out open source doesn't work for our business model" it's hard to argue with. If instead they talk about "evolving open source models" and whatnot, it feels like they want the best of both worlds. It's been happening a lot recently that companies pretend they are "open sourci…

I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means out of survival. Source available is the new open source, and what young technologists will grow up grinding on. You’ll have folks complain about it during the transition (as happens with any Overton window sort of event), but they’ll move on eventually and a new crop of tech industry will grow up with this as the new normal. Change is inevitable, broadly sp…

> I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means

Only if we let it, and stop shouting about it and finding alternatives every time a company does this.

This isn't a new thing; companies have been trying to play "almost open source" games for decades, and they'll continue playing those games as long as it either works or doesn't have sufficiently large penalties for trying. (Much as companies will continue violating copyleft licenses as long as they either get away with it or the penalties for trying are simply an expected part of the risk.)

The best possible response to a company doing this is that someone forks the code, starts or expands a competitor, and the original company's revenue drops massively as a deterrent.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#319

Post by scarface_74 »

lolinder wrote: post #312
scarface_74 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This anecdote is a lot less interesting, both because of the separation (you know some people vs they run a company with direct exposure) and lack of detail. I'm sure you do know some people who contribute, but you haven't given any details about their experience that would contradict OP's claim that contributing is hard.

Is this enough detail?

I work at AWS in Professional Services until tomorrow. I worked with the SA and had meetings with the service team responsible for the AWS Service in question to discuss the API shortcomings that we needed for automations. He contributed to Terraform once the APIs became available from our service team and I wrote the equivalent CloudFormation custom resources for a project (and open sourced on the public AWS Samples GitHub repo after going through the approval process) as part of a larger project.

I found a bug in the underlying service API that affected both my implementation and the Terraform provider my coworker wrote. I posted a sample in our internal Slack channel where the developers of the AWS service hang out and they fixed the API bug relatively quickly.

My coworker, had no problem getting his TF code merged in. I know the code he wrote and I went to the GitHub page before posting this and it is in there.

Later as native CloudFormation support was added, I replaced my custom resources with the native equivalent as part of the larger project I was working on.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#320

Post by JoshTriplett »

davorak wrote: post #139
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…

> This is purely a way for HashiCorp to ensure they are the only ones who can commercialize these formerly open source projects. Which is fine. But just go closed source, then, and own that, instead of trying to have it both ways. Pragmatically I would rather bsl than closed source and I am more likely to use a product that is bsl, with reasonable transfer time and license, than a 100% closed source product.

I'd rather have proprietary than "almost open source". Both aren't useful, but only one attempts to damage the common understanding of what "Open Source" means.
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