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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#471

Post by thenaturalist »

schmichael wrote: post #420
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.

Clearly you have good intentions and offer your support voluntarily, but

> I can’t make any promises...

really sums it all up in light of these big changes, and simply put the big picture (aka licensing) is what people build and bet their professional lives on.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#472

Post by sanderjd »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #464
sanderjd wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Why? I don't get this at all . Like, the direct pragmatic benefits of being able to read and modify source code are just enormous. The benefits of maintaining this pure definition of open source are amorphous at best, in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) If we don't have a common definition, everyone has their own, and there's no common understanding of what rights you have for a piece of Open Source software. That commons has far far more value than any one or ten pieces of software.

> That commons has far far more value than any one or ten pieces of software.

I don't think so.

I suppose I can understand why people who feel strongly that the OSI definition is perfect (or at least extremely good) are very intent on protecting it, whereas I see it as flawed and am thus less concerned about this fracturing. So I understand your perspective upon reflection, though I honestly have a lot of trouble imagining holding it myself.

A lot of people in this thread have been saying stuff like "just go full proprietary, that's better", and it sounds ridiculous to me every time I read a variant of it

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#473

Post by MattJ100 »

asymmetric wrote: post #451
cmiles74 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they mentioned, this is what the AGPL license is for. No one is suggesting that the people at HashiCorp should not be paid for their work. https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-software-licenses-101-agp...

If they made their tools AGPL, they themselves couldn’t build a cloud offering with additional, closed-source features.

That's not true. As the copyright holder they are not bound by the licence that they release it to others under.

The reason AGPL isn't being adopted in these situations is that it doesn't sufficiently protect against someone doing what e.g. AWS repeatedly does - turning open-source projects into services and then dominating the market while continuing to benefit from the upstream project. See the ElasticSearch licence change for a prominent example.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#474

Post by AYBABTME »

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…

Having it both ways is what I wish for them, as a user. I want their source, I want to be able to use it, I want them to sell it, and I don't want some copycat to undercut them.

Open-source isn't a gospel, it's a religion to some but not the end of the story in terms of what humanity can come up with. God(s?) didn't stop at "closed or open source". We can find alternatives while aiming for ideals.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#475

Post by mnahkies »

Feels like this could be a big issue for companies like https://www.scalr.com/ - I wonder if they have a commercial license already.

I've been tempted to try and put together a terraform cloud alternative myself - whilst I enjoy using it, the pricing is pretty expensive if you have many state files.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#476

Post by thenaturalist »

thallavajhula wrote: post #450

>We don’t believe this is in the spirit of open source. Open source seems to be evolving from being truly open source to being a variant with financially driven contingencies. HashiCorp have created great OSS over the years and am grateful for it. I understand their intention behind this move, but having a financially driven motive drive their OSS is not a good thing. I'd rather they not open source any of their code…

Ahem... Welcome to VC-fueled hypergrowth-capitalism!

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#477

Post by growse »

LVB wrote: post #427
ec109685 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fly.io was built off of nomad for a while. That wouldn’t be allowed in this new world.

Why not? What part of Fly.io is competing with any HashiCorp products?

I mean, they allow you to create a manifest that then auto provisions some infrastructure, so... Shrug

I'm being half-serious. Of course the point is that "competing" is deliberately very poorly defined, and it's entirely on the whim of hashicorp to decide whether or not you're competing and then impose a lot of legal costs on you.

It's a racket.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#478

Post by [deleted] »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #417
redeux wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

[deleted]

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#479

Post by jsiepkes »

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…

I'm not affiliated in any way with one of their competitors. Co-workers and I sent bug fix PR's to for example Vault. The last couple of years almost none of them were merged. These were small bug fixes, not (large) feature additions.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#480

Post by xinayder »

As others have pointed out, businesses should just ditch FL/OSS licenses as a whole and be a closed source product from the start.

There's a pattern here that, person builds an open source product, gets corporate sponsoring, funds a company, then suddenly the open source product steers away from open source because it's upsetting the corporate sponsors.

If you're so bothered by others using your work and not giving back (something that is ENTIRELY allowed by FL/OSS licenses), why make it open in the first place?

It kinda passes the image that these companies want to benefit from free work, but the moment someone uses their product for free and doesn't give back, it's just a nuisance for them.

as always, the hobbyist linux hacker is the problem (/s)

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