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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#691

Post by sanderjd »

orra wrote: post #630
sanderjd wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, as is probably clear if you read my comments on this, I personally think it would be better if the definition of "open source" did not exclude this kind of re-sale limitation. I don't think it's intuitive at all that this is required to fit the definition of "open source". It seems to me like a tacked on ideological stance from the gatekeeper of the definition, that isn't present in or implied by the wo…

> They aren't being disingenuous. You're putting words in their mouth, and then getting mad at them about those words they didn't say. No, they say open source needs to evolve, the implication this is an evolution (not devolution) of open source. Their announcement talks about how they spoke to OSS experts. That's not relevant: the experts would simply have said: that's not open source. Hashicorp several times say th…

> the implication this is an evolution (not devolution) of open source.

"implication"

> the experts would simply have said: that's not open source.

Presumably the experts did tell them that it is not an open source license, which is why they chose not to claim that it is.

> Permissive is a well established term in software licensing. No, the BSL is not.

I think BSL easily fits the bill for the word "permissive".

It's just all so much gatekeeping, and it's really tiring.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#692

Post by sanderjd »

cthalupa wrote: post #636
sanderjd wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, companies keep making services with code I can read and modify for my own use, and people in the community keep bringing this fight to them because they're peeved that other companies can't commercialize that software that they didn't build. Companies will naturally conclude they should just make proprietary software, which doesn't require a big fight. And I think that's a shame.

The problem is these companies almost universally could not exist without open source software that allowed them to commercialize things. It is impossible for the vast majority of companies to ever "give back" as much to open source as they profit off of it - from the Linux kernel, all the GNU stuff, the nginx or apache webservers hosting webpages and API access, the haproxy load balancers, the corosync/pacemaker the…

A very thoughtful argument, thank you!

To me, the difference is that these are all building blocks rather than standalone products. I think of these commercial products as making sense for standalone services, rather than libraries and other building blocks.

But also: I think the business model that built all those open source building blocks has always been pretty shitty, relying on a lot of altruistic un- or poorly- compensated work from people. And I think that's bad. But I don't think demanding that companies making useful services also be subjected to a shitty business model is a good solution.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#693

Post by sanderjd »

homewardbound wrote: post #687
sanderjd wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here's my perspective on these two competing models: 1. I can read all of the code, modify it, and self-host it for my own purposes, but the license disallows me from re-selling it. 2. I can read, modify, self-host, and commercialize a subset of the code, and the rest is an opaque SaaS. To me, as a customer with no interest in re-selling this code, I don't see how #2 is better than #1 in any way. And I find it inc…

Usually the two are not mutually exclusive. Terraform Cloud (the HC equivalent of the aforementioned "opaque SaaS") is afaik not open source and never has been, you can't read the code for it or self-host it. Not opining on the broader issue, just clarifying this point.

Yes thank you for the clarification.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#694

Post by sanderjd »

growse wrote: post #511
sanderjd wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just disagree that this is the whole point of open source.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#695

Post by pabs3 »

_msw_ wrote: post #601
e12e wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Does Amazon contribute code changes back to the software projects they modified when offering them as a service? > Yes, but not all changes are appropriate for upstream. But the (modified) source is available to consumers of the service either way, under the AGPL?

> But the (modified) source is available to consumers of the service either way, under the AGPL? If Amazon made an AGPLv3 licensed program available to others over a network, it would have an obligation to provide to anyone that has access to that program the complete corresponding source. Today, there aren't any services from Amazon that offer AGPLv3 licensed programs as a service. An example that may come to someon…

I think it would be awesome if Amazon could offer hosted AGPLv3 software, plus revenue share with the developers, code contributions to the original project and public forks containing non-upstreamable changes.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#696

Post by yellowapple »

quacker wrote: post #685
yellowapple wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

> The paid features have nothing to do with the providers; They absolutely do. If I use AWS and Pulumi could not deploy to AWS, well I'm certainly not going to buy Pulumi Cloud, am I? If I use multiple cloud providers and Pulumi doesn't support all of them, I'm unlikely to invest further in Pulumi Cloud, right? The providers determine whether I can even use the tool to do what I want in the first place. The providers…

> They absolutely do.

No, they absolutely do not. Pulumi - as in the actual tool, not its developers' equivalent to Terraform Cloud - would still exist and would have used those providers regardless of whether or not there's some Pulumi equivalent to Terraform Cloud. Pulumi also would've existed (and resulted in indirect profits via Pulumi Cloud) had that provider ecosystem not yet existed; it just would've been Pulumi starting it instead of Hashicorp/Terraform.

> The providers determine whether I can even use the tool to do what I want in the first place. The providers are 99% of the value!

And you can use 100% of that value without paying a fraction of a penny to Pulumi, just as you can without paying a fraction of a penny to Hashicorp. It's a completely different offering from their respective paid products altogether.

> I absolutely believe they indirectly profit off of that.

You say this as if it's a one-way street, but it ain't. Pulumi and Hashicorp profit from there being an ecosystem of providers compatible with both and therefore useful to both sets of customers. That's one of the main sales pitches for open source, after all: to collaborate on something that benefits everyone instead of wasting a bunch of effort on independent silos.

That is: Hashicorp indirectly profits off Pulumi's own contributions to that same ecosystem. They could profit even more by making Terraform compatible with Pulumi's provider interface (even still! I'm pretty sure Apache 2.0 code can be included in non-FOSS codebases, BUSL included).

Like, the relationship between Hashicorp and Pulumi is not just to the letter but to the spirit of free and open source software. If Pulumi's existence and success (despite being nowhere near that of Terraform, and despite also being open source - even more permissively so, in fact) is indeed what motivated Hashicorp to switch Terraform from MPL 2.0 to BUSL, then that's toxic as all hell and completely nullifies any of Hashicorp's lip service to "open source".

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#697

Post by aragilar »

sanderjd wrote: post #621
aragilar wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you change then? Practically only the 4th criteria would be one I'd change (but presumably it's there for a reason): "Integrity of the author's source code: The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit di…

Yes, I don't think it makes sense that the definition of "open source" requires that people can arbitrarily re-sell it. Like, just the words themselves, in my view, clearly don't imply that. I'm happy to stipulate that this is what was meant when the term was invented and that there is a single gatekeeper of the official definition in order to keep it this way. I'm just telling you that I (and I think many people) fi…

So if you got the rights from the BSL but the part about the code becoming Open Source you'd be happy with right? I think that's a completely fine attitude to take, and sure, all other things being equal, code licensed under the BSL is better than not having access to the source at all. But, given (at least) the majority of BSL projects were under an open source license, with external contributions, the spectre of "I have changed the deal, pray I do not alter it further" is raised. Additionally, if you read the actual post by Hashicorp, they do sail quite close to the wind in terms of implying the BSL is open source, so had they been more careful in their language (or even in their CLA), then people would be less annoyed.

The reason I'm personally annoyed at the attempt to drop the requirement for no restrictions on use is because it is something some academic software does (things like "if you use this code, any results must be shown to me before publishing and require my approval", which as you can imagine isn't great), or with rules around benchmarking (which some DB companies have been known to do), and it's significantly harder to draw the line between something that would allow the BSL, or the above two cases, than it is to require no restrictions on use.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#698

Post by aragilar »

pydry wrote: post #662
aragilar wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So requiring that anyone that runs your code and tries to publish a paper can only do with your approval (which is a real license that exist) is fine also? Saying "anyone can use this however they want" is much easier to check for that coming up with rules (and licenses) that allow for the BSL but not for the above academic licenses.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#699

Post by elderbarry »

teddyh wrote: post #568
JimDabell wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even GNU projects ask people to sign a CLA.

GNU projects assign the FSF as the copyright holder. The FSF is inherently trustworthy. (Since the FSF controls the GPL .)

One day someone untrustworthy will be in charge of the FSF, and ‘or later’ is suddenly going to be #awkward. Linus made the right call there, for sure.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#700

Post by anuraaga »

melezhik wrote: post #663
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…

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 ?

I am very much wondering this too. I've used Pulumi and like it a lot, it has a great UX in general. But the ecosystem for Terraform is orders of magnitude bigger, e.g. searching for help on Terraform is going to give a lot more results than Pulumi. As someone who can dig into details, this is not a big deal and can use Pulumi on personal projects but cannot in good faith recommend it for team projects only because of the ability to find resources is more important then.

I don't know if the license change actually means providers will not be able to work with Pulumi, but if it does, it seems risky to use Pulumi even for personal projects if newer provider versions (i.e., versions that work with newer products released by the cloud provider) will not work with Pulumi, it's a dead end. And that's not to mention the useful providers that aren't cloud and completely community developed that will not have the resources to maintain two codebases in any case (I'm thinking of Sendgrid).

I looked at terraform-sdk license - it still seems to be MPL. I think this means that all providers can continue to be open and work with both platforms, it will be important for Pulumi to clarify this to prevent the death spiral. Given some negative feedback towards the Hashicorp blog post from Pulumi employees on this thread, I am somewhat skeptical of this since if everything is fine, then complaining will otherwise have a negative effect, that us users have to assume that Hashicorp is actually stomping them out. And if it's the case, sorry but in good faith to everyone else that may need to work on infrastructure I make, I will have to be complicit in the stomping.

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