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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#481

Post by sanderjd »

growse wrote: post #444
sanderjd wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would much rather contribute to a project with a CLA and the possibility to be commercially licensed by the entity driving the work on the project. I'm not that interested in working for Amazon for free...

You can't have it both ways. You either believe in, and enthusiastically participate in the development of free software (the philosophy of which requires freedoms to be available on an equitable basis), or you don't.

I am not an ideologue (and I frankly struggle to understand why people find it appealing to be ideologues).

I just want there to be a lot of software made that is useful to me. Software is far more useful to me if I can read and modify its source code.

So my metric is just whether I think something will incentivize people to make more or less of that kind of software. I worry that people will make less and less software that runs as a service in this fashion, as it n becomes more and more obvious that the benefits of that software flow to giant integrated cloud platform providers rather than to the people who make the software.

Being a chump is not motivating, and I think that's the current incentive structure. So I like seeing people try different structures that seem to me like they structure the incentives better.

But you're totally right, philosophy has nothing to do with it for me.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#482

Post by pabs3 »

_msw_ wrote: post #441
thayne wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disclosure: I work for Amazon. AWS never offered MongoDB as a managed service, or used any of their server software when it was licensed under APLv3, or SSPLv1. However, we have contributed patches to MongoDB even after their license change to improve its performance on Graviton processors. Because that's what's good for customers, and MongoDB is an important customer and partner. AGPLv3 gives all the permissions nee…

Does Amazon have any policies against offering AGPv3 software as a service?

Does Amazon contribute funding back to the software projects they offer as a service?

Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#483

Post by softveda »

glenngillen wrote: post #469
myroon5 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud revenue is a subset of Subscription revenue, and Subscription revenue is mostly Support ($101.9M). In fact, 3/4 of their total revenue is Support

I don’t think Support is what you think it is here. Ask any Vault or Terraform Enterprise customer how much they pay and what it’s for.

Correct, HashiCorp support price is built into its SKU tiers like Bronze, Silver and Gold. They don't charge for support tickets.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#484

Post by di4na »

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…

I will say.

All that it achieve is making sure noone can build a better product. Aka "yes our product is crap in a lot of places, but we don't want to fix it. Better extract licensing fees by locking you all with us".

The behaviour of dying companies. Which make sense. Their business model never worked.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#485

Post by ZiiS »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #384
joeduffy wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Joe, Pulumi Founder here.] Said well (and thank you for being a customer and valuable member of our community!) The analogy I draw sometimes is that our open source infrastructure as code SDK ("Pulumi") is like Git, and our commercial offering ("Pulumi Cloud") is like GitHub. Like GitHub, the Pulumi Cloud offers valuable features that go beyond the open source project for teams looking to manage lots of projects sec…

Is the Pulumi Individual Edition open for use by solo founders operating as a sole proprietership? I can't find anything clarifying whether it's individual (as in hobbyist, nonprofessional) or individual, as in, one person not collaborating with anyone else.

Yes it is open to individual comercial use (companies much larger then sole proprieterships may only have one person doing inferstructure). They also have a version for nonprofits https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/open-source-free-tier/

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#486

Post by ZiiS »

MattJ100 wrote: post #473
asymmetric wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 licenc…

I am not sure being closed source is much comfort if AWS decide they want to crush you.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#487

Post by asymmetric »

mperham wrote: post #467
asymmetric wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A license controls what OTHERS can do with your source. You, the copyright holder, can do anything you want.

Thanks, I stand corrected. How does this play with third-party contributions? Others might be the copyright-holders of a sub-section of the code.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#488

Post by ZiiS »

mfer wrote: post #111
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for. High level, times have changed. Source should be (my two cents, ymmv) about a mutually beneficial partnership between builders and users, not “give it all away for free or you’re not legit.” Users get to understand and extend what they’re running (via source), while the project steward/maintainer/owner can continue to do so. It is a balance to be…

Looking at the public data [1], Hashicorp looses money every quarter. At some point they need to stop burning cash because they have yet to figure out how to run a sustainable business. I don't know enough about their operations to have good suggestions on how to become sustainable. But, I don't like this move. There are many sustainable open source companies. Moving to source available from open source will likely n…

What is so frustraiting is their model seems sound; they just had rediculusly high pricing.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#489

Post by pcthrowaway »

sebastianz wrote: post #470
pcthrowaway wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SUSE, Canonical, Prisma (though their dashboard is closed source), Gitlab, pretty much every crypto company in the blockchain/web3 space. And Hashicorp + Red Hat managed to make it work as open source companies for >10 years also There are many more "open core" companies, like TimescaleDB, Docker, etc, who then sell proprietary services on top of the open source software

Why do you think "open core", which most of those are, is somehow better than BSL? > pretty much every crypto company in the blockchain/web3 space The entire "space" has yet to prove to be sustainable. Most of these are hype-driven borderline scams, I would not list them in a _sustainable open source business_ context :)

> Why do you think "open core", which most of those are, is somehow better than BSL?

Firstly, I don't have a problem with BSL. I do think in general it's a bit of a slap in the face to build a business on the backs of volunteer contributors, and then close-source all your codebases which are comprised of their work.

Sure, when people contributed, they signed a CLA which gives Hashicorp the right to relicense the work (which has legitimate uses outside of killing open source, such as giving them the ability to make that software available under other terms in addition to their open source offering)

But when as little as a year ago they promised "We remain committed that the core of our technology will always remain open source." (https://web.archive.org/web/20220703202305/https://www.hashi...)

it gives whiplash to the people who contributed based on that promise.

Actually, I don't even know if this is legal, but even if it is, it's a huge violation of the trust of outside contributors to their software products.

> The entire "space" has yet to prove to be sustainable.

I agree that it's unproven, but this downturn has made apparent that so are the majority of software companies which have not IPOed and shown a sustained profit for 5+ years.

I'd give Uniswap pretty good odds of outliving the majority of YC startups.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#490

Post by leg100 »

I've built an open source clone* of terraform cloud. Will it contravene BSL?

1. Under the hood, it runs the terraform binary.

2. Receives API calls from the terraform binary.

3. Uses a modicum of code from the terraform cloud SDK.

I think I've answered my own question with (1), which may constitute "hosting" or "embedding" a Hashicorp product.

* https://github.com/leg100/otf

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