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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#361

Post by aatd86 »

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…

Open-source at big companies has a different financial structure.

It's not comparable.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#362

Post by ramses0 »

Rapzid wrote: post #203
davorak wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wish I could give you more upvotes. I'd also much rather have "open source" with commercialization restrictions than closed source. It's still in most people's best interest to contribute to these projects if they were before, or would have before. Many businesses(and this is where most of the contributions get funded from, let's be real) rely on these projects and have no intention of selling them or competing wit…

"Source Available" please.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#363

Post by Coryodaniel »

glenngillen wrote: post #343
koolba wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, check some of the previous HashiConf keynotes to see the types of customers that are paying for it and which products they use. Also HashiCorp's financials are public, although without a per-product breakout. You'll have to connect the dots between some of these things to try and get into the rough ballpark.

I read their s1 and it looked like a lot of the revenue came from professional services.

I’m curious how this affects consultants and PSOs that might be competing w Hashi’s services business and running terraform on jenkins or whatever.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#364

Post by jen20 »

deadbunny wrote: post #256
jen20 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Genuine Question. If it hasn't what is your recourse? I can't see a PR to remolve all your commits being accepted (even if it should be).

That’s a great question - I don’t know the answer. I’m assuming enough lawyers spent enough time on this that it is at least broadly ok, I’m mostly interested in how this was approached from a product perspective.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#365

Post by jen20 »

jkodroff wrote: post #329
ris wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pulumi resources are immutable in the program after you declare them. I don’t think this analogy really works. It’s not like CDK - Pulumi does not compile down to an intermediate format. When you write a Pulumi program you’re effectively creating a DAG in memory. The resources will be created in whatever order and with the maximum parallelization the dependencies allow.

Indeed, you cannot control the execution order (often much to my chagrin), only influence what the evaluator does via well-defined, declarative, options.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#366

Post by ms4720 »

aatd86 wrote: post #357
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 teac…

Imagine that someone see your open-source code and creates a competitor product by assimilating it... Imagine that this entity is much bigger than you even... I don't think you'd be happy, would you? I know I wouldn't be... :-)

Like Free bad?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#367

Post by evanriley »

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…

Hasn't mitchellh stepped down from a leadership role? Why would he have "the ultimate input on this decision"?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#368

Post by ms4720 »

ms4720 wrote: post #366
aatd86 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that someone see your open-source code and creates a competitor product by assimilating it... Imagine that this entity is much bigger than you even... I don't think you'd be happy, would you? I know I wouldn't be... :-)

Like Free bad?

Should be FreeBSD, damned Auto correct

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#369

Post by alance »

The licensing changes seem to imply that if they have a service and you also build a similar service, but offer it for cheaper, then (if they want to) they can price you out of the market with licensing fees.

One of my weekend projects https://tfstate.com is intended to aid with statefile configuration drift detection. Which (I've since discovered) is also something that Hashicorp offers as a service.

I feel worried.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#370

Post by alexandre_m »

redeux wrote: post #327
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…

>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. OSS doesn't mean that you have to accept any PRs that showed up in your repo, nor does it mean that you have to let a competitor steer your project simply because you're building i…

You have to acknowledge that all these OSS projects officially backed by a corporation don't want you to contribute certain features that are part of their enterprise offering. As soon as there's an "enterprise" tier, contributions are not only based on their merit, but also evaluated as a threat to their business model.

Sometimes it's not even obvious for external contributors, but there may be some small overlap with other paid features that are part of their product roadmap.

If a project on Github only has maintainers from the corporate side, you can be certain that they will ultimately drive the product for their own interest solely.

We should always pay close attention to the governance model of projects we depend on or that we wish to contribute to.

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