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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#581

Post by mst »

dragonwriter wrote: post #514
fasterik wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Being able to tear through the source code of something to figure out why it's doing what it's doing is valuable even if you never make changes.

I worked for a company a lot of years ago that had BSDi licenses for some of it servers and had paid an extra fee for source access and that -did- actually come in handy to me once or twice.

Later, the same went for the Radiator RADIUS server where you got source access automatically with a license purchase.

White box versus black box debugging is absolutely something that can make a difference, especially when something goes wrong.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#582

Post by mst »

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…

They appear to be aware that the ecosystem is important and providers have remained under an OSS license (at least as of this change).

So without defending the change they -have- made, that doesn't seem like where you're going to run into problems as a result of said change.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#583

Post by justinclift »

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…

Hadn't heard of Pulumi before.

It sounds like a Terraform alternative, but looking at the website it doesn't really convey if it's a Terraform fork or ground-up re-write, or something else?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#584

Post by paulddraper »

Xylakant wrote: post #453
paulddraper wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically true, but practically different. Lucene is the core piece but %-wise the minority of the ES product. There's no Lucene "competitor" to Elasticsearch.

> There's no Lucene "competitor" to Elasticsearch. Apache Solr, which existed long before Elasticsearch was conceived.

Solr is a separate product. It is also an Apache project, though so are a million other projects.

It also doesn't even have a commercial offering; Elasticsearch in no way affects any financial ambitions.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#585

Post by voidmain »

> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products.

Having your use of something important hinge on this one awkward sentence seems kind of scary. It's unclear to me whether, if you use (say) terraform for production infra, and someday HashiCorp releases a new product competitive with yours or merges with your competitor, your use of TF is then in violation of the license. "Offering the Work" is not defined and seems like it could be interpreted in different ways.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#586

Post by aantti »

This is very sad but also not very surprising. It's notoriously hard to sell an 'open core' product (mostly, against yourself OSS) and structure the entire GTM and the org properly for scale. Having built a successful 'open core' company before & judging from the first-hand experience - this looks like an extremely desperate move, indeed. (Btw, we never changed the license, but discussed it often, ofc.) It's also all very disruptive, destructive and hostile to the community - it's 'we aren't open source anymore,' so I'm surprised they are trying to convince people otherwise (gaslighting, eh?) I'd expect the 'open core' enthusiasm of the past few years to decrease dramatically, and I wouldn't recommend an 'open core' path to anyone who's trying to build an actual big company around their OSS. I remember the time when 'open core' was a taboo word, post-MySQL/Oracle. I was doing the company launch and accidentally told a reporter we were doing [something like] open core - that didn't work nicely :) It's ironic and sad, BSL comes from the very same folks who basically invented 'open core', then spoiled it forever. It's been also always thought-provoking to me, too, those folks never build more - or differently - after MySQL.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#587

Post by nailer »

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…

Just want to say I love Pulumi and think using actual code (rather than HCL config files) is the ideal realisation of the infra-as-code vision.

Pulumi being open source while Terraform is now proprietary cements that.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#588

Post by nailer »

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…

> Without further elaboration, what you're calling "upstream fixes" may have been considered "working as intended" at HashiCorp.

Fair enough, let's see the PRs so we can judge for ourselves.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#589

Post by m4rtink »

duckmysick wrote: post #527
asymmetric wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Projects can have a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). It gives the owner of the project a right to republish (or copyright) the contributions. You can't contribute to the project without signing it.

This might also prevent a lot of people from contributing due to the added paperwork.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#590

Post by nailer »

justinclift wrote: post #583
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…

Hadn't heard of Pulumi before. It sounds like a Terraform alternative, but looking at the website it doesn't really convey if it's a Terraform fork or ground-up re-write, or something else?

Pulumi is infra as code. Not like Terraform define it - using the world's most hated config file format - but actual code - Python, TypeScript, etc.
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