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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#411

Post by light_hue_1 »

manojlds wrote: post #154
nezirus wrote: post #24

Dunno about others, but I always ask myself where these companies would be if their software was under non free license from the start. This is hostile to end users, small people an companies, not just big megacorps wanting the "steal" the code and run it as a service. Be successful in running and using Hashicorp's software, and they decide to shut you down if you are deemed a competitor.

From what I know about BSL, nothing changes for me, except some notion what "true open source spirit" is and what not.

Everything changes.

At any moment for any reason they can declare that you your use or your business in some way competes with them and cut you off.

You have no recourse. They don't need to explain it. They can even add a product remotely like what you're building or misunderstand your product and you are screwed.

The BSL carries with it immense legal risk.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#412

Post by ec109685 »

cstejerean wrote: post #233
Arnavion wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not as bad as that. You retain copyright over your changes and have the say in whether they can be relicensed or not, unless you signed your copyright away via a CLA or similar. So you just have to not sign CLAs and not contribute to codebases that require CLAs.

I don't think that's true for anything with a permissive license, only contributions to copyleft licenses. If I contribute code to something under the GPL then my contribution can only ever be distributed under something that is compatible with the terms of the GPL, the company cannot restrict those rights further in a new license without my consent to relicense. If I contribute to something with a permissive license…

Their CLA faq talks about how its purpose is to allow them to release the software commercially. No other entity has that ability unless they ask everyone to sign a CLA of their own.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/HCP:NASDAQ

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#413

Post by solatic »

Bought HCP at the IPO, took a massive paper loss when the tech bubble in the market burst, but held onto the stock as a long-term hold because I believed in the core of the company. Fuck this, I'm selling just as soon as the market opens. It's clear that Hashicorp's internal culture has moved 180 degrees away from where they were in the Terraform 0.x days.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#415

Post by brunoqc »

vmatsiiako wrote: post #236
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…

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.

> The absolute majority of our codebase is licensed under MIT

What is not MIT licensed?

When you self-host, do you have access to every features for free?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#416

Post by JohnMakin »

Salgat wrote: post #410
JohnMakin wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use a mix of secrets manager and certificate manager products in AWS and accomplish essentially the same things Vault promises for much cheaper (and easier to manage). I’m underselling of course the vast capabilities of vault. but most companies don’t need those advanced features, and they don’t really sell them, they sell and lock you into features that once you implement are going to become an extraodinary…

AWS Secrets Manager was so easy to setup. With implicit auth using IAM roles on our EC2s and the aws sdk I was able to add secrets support in literally a day for all our services.

and arguably more secure than self-hosted vault for this same purpose.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#417

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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…

Sure, OSS doesn't mean you have to take all PRs, but if your claim is that others are just taking your code and not giving anything back, one of the alleged leeches showing up to talk about how they've tried to give back is very much pertinent.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#418

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #346
JoshTriplett wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 continu…

> 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. Example of the last time this worked?

I don't know what the impact was on their revenue, but pretty much anything Oracle has ever touched.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#419

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

thayne wrote: post #395
unknownian wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Um. Mongodb changed its license before AWS offered a mongodb compatible service. And since I can't get the source code for documentdb, either it isn't actually using a fork of mongodb, or Amazon isn't complying with the AGPL. I think the latter is pretty unlikely.

It's a little funny in this context, but allow me to pull this out from my quotes file:

> Their proprietary license protecting their code set competitors and intentional clones back days, weeks or months ... years ago.

- benologist, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17454032

If AWS decides to copy your product, going closed-source or source-available just means they have to copy it from design docs or protocol specs. That's more friction than being able to reuse code outright, but it's not going to stop them.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#420

Post by schmichael »

NathanFlurry wrote: post #396

We built our OSS company (Apache 2.0) with Nomad at its core. We provide game server orchestration with a handful of services around it, which could be misconstrued to be considered providing a "competitive offering to HashiCorp." Needless to say, we'll be freezing our Nomad version at the last MPL version because of how vague the license is (intentionally). We also use CockroachDB which uses BSL, but we're not provi…

Please reach out to me: schmichael at hashicorp.

I’m the Nomad Eng Lead and while licensing is out of my control we have a lot of users in a similar position to you: not knowing what might someday could be construed competition. I can’t make any promises but will do whatever I can to give you confidence that Nomad is still the right tool for your job.

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