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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#511

Post by growse »

sanderjd wrote: post #481
growse wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softw…

> ... 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.

The whole point of open source is that everybody has the opportunity to contribute to the benefit of everybody. You don't get to say "oh, but nazis / Amazon / rapists don't get to use this because I disagree with their morals".

The incentive to contribute comes from being part of a community that gets to experience better quality software. For many (me included), that's plenty. I really don't care what Amazon does - I'm neither a customer, nor an investor.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#512

Post by gravlaks »

fishnchips wrote: post #176
fishpen0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they think we'll go crawling back to their 100x more expensive 6-7 figure Terraform Enterprise garbage just because we can't use spacelift anymore, then I'll show them the team of engineers we can hire for the same dollars to move the whole stack to pure pulumi or crossplane or the various CDKs The bald faced disingenuous nature of this change here is wild. They can't compete at their pricing because their pricing…

Spacelift co-founder here - please don’t panic. We will make sure you can continue to use Spacelift :)

I don't know the details of BSL, but can HashiCorp now require compensation/$$$ from Spacelift, Scalr, Env0, etc? In that case, these products can be forced to offer similar pricing as Terraform Cloud.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#514

Post by dragonwriter »

fasterik wrote: post #64
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…

>Which is fine. But just go closed source, then, and own that, instead of trying to have it both ways. This seems too black and white. Don't their customers get value from having source code available, even if there are restrictions on how that source code can be used?

> Don't their customers get value from having source code available, even if there are restrictions on how that source code can be used?

For the most part, no, the main direct customer benefit comes from the absence of lock-in with regard to maintenance and services thar results from the absence of usage restrictions.

There's some potential indirect ecosystem benefit for customers from the somewhat lower friction for partners in some source-available-but-use-restricted situations, but otherwise for most customers its the same as any other proprietary license.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#515

Post by j1elo »

lima wrote: post #350
j1elo wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The huge difference is where the copyright of the code lays. OSS projects that require contributors to assign their copyright away, should not be trusted, and should not receive goodwill contributions to begin with. Otherwise, what today is Apache 2.0, tomorrow can become Commercial, while asking nobody for permission, because the maintainers have ownership of 100% of the code. Not that OSS projects backed by commerc…

This is incorrect, this can happen with any permissive license (BSD, Apache 2...) regardless of copyright assignments.

The rule is simple: If you want to relicense a project, then you need approval from all the individual copyright holders. It does not matter if you are relicensing between permissive OSS licenses such as, for example, from Apache 2.0 to MIT. They are different licenses, so you need permission for the change.

That's why OSS is commonly called a "Community". The software's copyright belongs to the hands of all the community of developers who have written and contributed code.

What a CLA usually does is grant perpetual permission to do anything with the code, including to relicense without asking. Practically speaking, CLAs grant full control to a single hand. Thus, OSS projects with such CLAs are not part of any so-called "Open Source Community" in any meaningful way.

EDIT: Changed "CLAs grant full ownership" -> "CLAs grant full control", to avoid misunderstandings.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#516

Post by hkt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #504
pessimizer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means out of survival. I don't think this is happening at all. Open source means the same thing it's always meant. Some people are just retreating from open source. Which is fine, they should be writing Free Software anyway if they want the world to have it, or use proprietary licenses if they don't. Otherwise very wealthy people will live on your back.

The OSI Open Source Definition and the FSF Free Software Definition are for most practical purposes identical (and most licenses meet both or neither); historically, the Open Source and Free Software communities have somewhat different reasons for preferring the same thing, but the things are the same.

Not so: open source licenses tend not to have any clauses requiring reciprocation, free software licenses do. Think MIT or BSD vs GPL.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#517

Post by netheril96 »

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…

Then don't complain about people not contributing to your projects. You reserve the right to reject my PR, and I reserve the right not to contribute any more.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#518

Post by elnygren »

Why are people so hostile towards BSL? Paying/asking money for great products is fine and if the product's source code is in git, the better.

Not everything has to be _free_. The major benefit of OSS for many is that you can read the source code. The major benefit of paid SaaS is that things just work and you pay for that. BSL can be the perfect combination of these.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#519

Post by dragonwriter »

hamandcheese wrote: post #352
j1elo wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The huge difference is where the copyright of the code lays. OSS projects that require contributors to assign their copyright away, should not be trusted, and should not receive goodwill contributions to begin with. Otherwise, what today is Apache 2.0, tomorrow can become Commercial, while asking nobody for permission, because the maintainers have ownership of 100% of the code. Not that OSS projects backed by commerc…

Does assigning copyright with a CLA mean that I would not be free to, say, submit the same PR to more permissive fork as well as Hashicorp's vault?

> Does assigning copyright with a CLA mean that I would not be free to, say, submit the same PR to more permissive fork as well as Hashicorp's vault?

A CLA, by definition, licenses rather than assigns copyright. A CAA assigns copyright. Typically, a CLA does not restrict the licensors right to license the same contribution elsewhere (if it is legally derivative of a project whose own license is restrictive, that may prevent it, however.)

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#520

Post by dragonwriter »

j1elo wrote: post #515
lima wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect, this can happen with any permissive license (BSD, Apache 2...) regardless of copyright assignments.

The rule is simple: If you want to relicense a project, then you need approval from all the individual copyright holders. It does not matter if you are relicensing between permissive OSS licenses such as, for example, from Apache 2.0 to MIT. They are different licenses, so you need permission for the change. That's why OSS is commonly called a " Community ". The software's copyright belongs to the hands of all the co…

> What a CLA usually does is grant perpetual permission to do anything with the code, including to relicense without asking. Practically speaking, CLAs grant full ownership to a single hand.

No, they don’t. CLAs don’t transfer ownership.

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