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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#701

Post by personomas »

sgt wrote: post #615
personomas wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH I don't know anything about Nomand. Feel free to use it. That might be good for you, I certainly don't want to deter you. All I meant was that I didn't think Nomad would survive in the Long Term a change of license from MIT to BSL, when there also exists Kubernetes. On the contrary, I think Terraform will survive in form or another. Either the BSL license will be lenient enough or people will fork Terraform and s…

Your statement was "Nomad is a dead product" without knowing anything about the product. That's something to consider next time you make such statements.

I think I know enough to make the statement, actually. I don't know enough to tell some random person not use it. Think about that. I at least uphold the integrity to be honest with you!

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#702

Post by miraculixx »

The weird part is that Hashicorp doesn't have a single core product that is valuable by itself. Their stuff is infrastructure built to enable an ecosystem. It's a hub, all the plugins, providers etc. are the spokes. The real value, the wheel so to speak, comes from building on top of all of that. If they can't compete on that level, well, so be it. Now forcing everyone to pay them for building the hub, the core part, means the ecosystem will crumble. No hub, no spokes. Also it makes Hashicorp the villant, not their competitors.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#703

Post by miraculixx »

This shows a problem in today's open source ecosystem: we have too many who profit from other people's work without giving back. In particular large corps should not be allowed to do that, and in fact by their very own Code of Conducts they are required to do the ethically right thing - to contribute and/or pay back to the community. That is especially true when they earn money by providing OSS as a service.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#704

Post by danw1979 »

wlonkly wrote: post #245
danw1979 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your line of thinking was that Pulumi uses terraform providers under the hood, right ? It’s a good question. I suspect several forks might be happening as we speak.

I believe providers are still OSS-licensed.

Correct, according to the Hashicorp license change FAQ - https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#How-does-this-impact-t...

And I checked the contribution guide for the aws provider, no mention of a CLA there. I wonder if Hashicorp would be able to pull the providers under the same BSL in future ?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#705

Post by miraculixx »

NathanFlurry wrote: post #396

We built our OSS company (Apache 2.0) with Nomad at its core. We provide game server orchestration with a handful of services around it, which could be misconstrued to be considered providing a "competitive offering to HashiCorp." Needless to say, we'll be freezing our Nomad version at the last MPL version because of how vague the license is (intentionally). We also use CockroachDB which uses BSL, but we're not provi…

My thought too. But it won't last for long. Security bugs will show up. What then?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#706

Post by miraculixx »

sneak wrote: post #647
api wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SaaS itself is against the spirit of open source, if not the letter of the license. It is the most closed model of providing software, far more closed than closed source binaries. Whether it runs on open source behind the scenes doesn’t matter; your data is controlled by the provider and you have no privacy or ability to run anything on your own terms. At the very least anyone using open source to run SaaS for profit…

SaaS is not software; SaaS is a service. The spirit of free software is giving software away as a gift and a tool for people to use to do whatever they like with it, business included. Running a service based on free software is absolutely within the spirit of free software. Free software isn't about a circle of gifts, it's about software freedoms. You're not obligated in spirit to "give something back" because you u…

Well yes and no.

Yes it's ok to use OSS to operate your business. That's a sound and intended way of using OSS. Everyone benefits.

No it's not ok to provide a competing product to the very people that you get the core of it from. That's literally stealing if not fraud. At least it is ethically dubious.

I'm not saying it's literally a yes/no decision, but this is the baseline.

I think OSS projects should offer a paid for "integration license" by default.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#707

Post by xfz »

The last four companies I worked at have spent a fortune on SaaS, not just AWS but a host of providers for observability, management etc.

They've all used Terraform extensively but always rolled their own means of deploying IaC, with solutions more clunky than CloudFormation which let's face it isn't brilliant.

Why did Hashicorp fail to win this business? I think their pricing just seems too outlandish and is based on paying for the value of software they've already open sourced rather than being tied to the cost of providing a good service plus reasonable margin.

Their strategy appears to have failed, exacerbated by the macroeconomic landscape. I doubt their chosen solution - Microsoftification of their open source project - is going to do them any favours.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#708

Post by klohto »

sneak wrote: post #579
martey wrote: post #375

HashiCorp's CLA page from two months ago ( https://web.archive.org/web/20230610041432/https://www.hashi... ): "We require our external contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement ("CLA") in order to ensure that our projects remain licensed under Free and Open Source licenses such as MPL2 while allowing HashiCorp to build a sustainable business. HashiCorp is committed to having a true Free and Open Source Sof…

Never sign a CLA! The only reason they ask for such is to relicense, and the only reason they would relicense if they are already foss is to become proprietary. Linux doesn't require a CLA for contributions. These open source cosplay clowns do.

https://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#709

Post by comprev »

yellowapple wrote: post #70
chunk_waffle wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Gruntwork.io, makers of Terragrunt, I think? I always just stuck to vanilla Terraform but recall coming across them at some point.

I wouldn't call them a competitor by any stretch; more like a partner. A Terragrunt codebase just wraps Terraform, with the same exact backends (including Hashicorp's SaaS offerings) and the same exact providers and everything.

How long before HashiCorp integrate Gruntwork’s “solution” into their own Terraform codebase I wonder?

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#710

Post by comprev »

personomas wrote: post #556
speedgoose wrote: post #446

Well, that simplifies a lot the choice between Nomad and Kubernetes.

Nomad is a dead product. I think Terraform has hope though

Nomad is far from dead. It’s a good option when you want resource scheduling and can’t use containers.
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