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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

661–670 of 760 posts

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who wants to run their own instance is welcome to and people do and thus find it useful. The idea that the world would be better off if we made it closed source and prevented that... is just nonsense. How does making something closed source automatically mean someone can't run their own instance of it, even for free? Closed source does not mean 'You can only download this if you pay us', just as open source…

Closed source doesn't preclude developers distributing it for free, BSL isn't claiming to be Open Source.. but it's silly to insist that that software that is *publically available* to anyone to download and run.. describe itself as "closed source".

It's source available. Which is not the same thing as open source.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#662
post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exist so that you can continue to use hashicorp tools in your business for free and look at/change their source code like you would any other software. The one restriction is that you can't compete with their hosted services using their software. Which 99% of people who use their software have zero interest in. The "it's not fair! it's not real open source!" narrative is pumped up by companies like Amazon that f…

No, Open Source has always required that usage be unrestricted (Either Freedom 0 or OSD/DFSG points 5 and 6). Allowing any restrictions on usage tends to get political, as people use the license to push their specific issue, making it much harder to share and use code without issues.

It's a freedom that does not affect 99% of users.

It does affect the the richest, most abusive corporations though.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#663

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…

However I wonder what’s pulumi future gonna be with that move ? So you guys now are going to maintain a transpiller for a closed product, huh ?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#664
post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enclosed-within-glass software

But it's not just visible... you can submit a PR if you like, and people do.

That's true. I think the taxonomy I'd really endorse is that the dichotomy is between free software and proprietary software, and within each there are a range of restrictions/guarantees (depending on your PoV: user or developer) that licenses might have.

The broad distinction we care about within free software is copyleft vs. permissive, and one important one in proprietary software is source-available vs. closed-source.

Then besides all of that there are the non-licensing realities of how development is actually carried out, whether it is collaborative with outsiders, and with which outsiders...

The terms get harder because open/closed suggests straightforward opposites that partition all the options. But I'd characterize licenses like BSL and the Fair Source License as 'generous proprietary licenses with public source availability', but not open-source.

I have a feeling that the term 'open-source' is more likely to erode than 'free software', in the coming decades. We'll see, I guess.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not weird at all to go public before profitability, that was even the standard in tech for the longest time. The IPO was a _fundraising_ event, not a dump-the-company-on-the-public-and-move-on event.

All of the current BigTech companies except Amazon were profitable before going public - Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. The vast majority of tech companies that IPOd since Facebook have been a disaster of an investment.

Time didn't start in 2004.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#666

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…

> This is 100% in the spirit of open source.

No it's not!

It's allowed, but it's not in the spirit.

The spirit is everyone sharing.

It can be true at the same time that "mechanisms to force sharing are against the spirit" and "entities that don't share are against the spirit".

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Because that would be a waste of time unless there's some specific case where an existing provider is insufficient. > Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor. Pulumi itself is free software, just like Terraform was (and hopefully…

Are you pretending they aren't a competitor profiting off that work though? Pulumi is free, except you pay for the features that aren't free: https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/ . So, Pulumi has grown their directly competing product partially on top of the Terraform ecosystem - and I'd argue they'd be half as successful without reusing Terraform providers - and make money off of that product. It's at least understandabl…

> Pulumi is free, except you pay for the features that aren't free: https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/.

The paid features have nothing to do with the providers; AFAICT that's competing with Hashicorps's backend / state management offerings - namely, Terraform Cloud: https://www.hashicorp.com/products/terraform/pricing?ajs_aid...

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#668
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where these companies would be if their software was under non free license from the start. Yep open source is used as a marketing. I doubt they'd gain much adoption if it started with BSL at first place.

> I doubt they'd gain much adoption if it started with BSL at first place Adoption is one risk, https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/graphs/contributors is an entirely different risk

Sentry, another BUSL licensed project, seems fine? https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/graphs/contributors

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. That nobody has tried suggests paranoia at best. > Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects. The AGPL exists and already fully addresses that.

I'm thinking that AGPL is, indeed, the Ebola of viral licenses, but it does not cover the case where a large cloud vendor simply takes an AGPL-licensed product and offers it as a cloud service. AGPL does not cover that case. Nothing the cloud vendor does challenges any of the AGPL's terms. The cloud vendor issue is license agnostic. ElasticSearch comes to mind. For the AGPL side, MongoDB and Neo4J come to mind. Recal…

> but it does not cover the case where a large cloud vendor simply takes an AGPL-licensed product and offers it as a cloud service

Because it doesn't need to, nor should it. That's only a competition issue if the upstream developer is actually offering a managed version themselves - and in that case they already have "we actually developed this software so we're the best option for supporting it in The Cloud™" as a selling point that even the likes of Amazon and Google cannot replicate (not without themselves participating in the actual development of the software in question). They should lean into that selling point and offer a better managed offering than what any cloud vendor could ever hope to offer.

Plus, as I've mentioned in sibling comments, large cloud vendors probably don't have much interest in reselling Hashicorp's products anyway. Why resell Terraform when you're trying to lock customers into CloudFormation? Why resell Vault when you're trying to lock customers into Secrets Manager? Why resell any of Hashicorp's products when the thing for which they're marketed - avoiding vendor lock-in - is literally antithetical to your business model of maximizing vendor lock-in?

> But, that hole only becomes toxic the moment you modify the code or plug proprietary stuff into it. Cloud vendors don't do that.

Sure they do. If they didn't modify their managed versions of FOSS applications to integrate tightly with the rest of their offerings, then why would anyone bother to use the cloud-vendor-managed versions in the first place? If there's no benefit integration-wise relative to just slapping the vanilla version on some EC2 instance or EKS container or whatever, then what's the point?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closed source doesn't preclude developers distributing it for free, BSL isn't claiming to be Open Source.. but it's silly to insist that that software that is *publically available* to anyone to download and run.. describe itself as "closed source".

It's source available. Which is not the same thing as open source.

I don't think anyone is arguing that BSL is capital O Open Source, and even the BSL licence stressses that it is not an Open Source licence. But both "closed source" and "source available" feel like poor descriptors for a project that is developed in the open and takes PRs from outside contributors.
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