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HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

hashicorp.com

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Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#81

Post by version_five »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59
version_five wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideology is great until people need to eat. That’s what revenue is for That sounds like what the GP comment is saying. If someone said "turns out open source doesn't work for our business model" it's hard to argue with. If instead they talk about "evolving open source models" and whatnot, it feels like they want the best of both worlds. It's been happening a lot recently that companies pretend they are "open sourci…

I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means out of survival. Source available is the new open source, and what young technologists will grow up grinding on. You’ll have folks complain about it during the transition (as happens with any Overton window sort of event), but they’ll move on eventually and a new crop of tech industry will grow up with this as the new normal. Change is inevitable, broadly sp…

I agree except I think it's our of short term greed plus arrogance rather than survival. Maybe in some cases that's not true, but when companies like Meta are championing pretend open source, it's not existential for them, it's trying to push for a world where they have more control. Like I said, I don't have a problem with closed source business models, it's the deliberate conflation that's troubling, especially when it's leveraged to get community contributions.

On the other hand, if popular software becomes faux-pen source (I read that somewhere recently) and community members stop contributing, it's a loss too because it means we all become takers on whatever company's terms.

Your almost certainly right about the window shifting, I'm going to keep complaining anyway.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#82

Post by hashtag-til »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #65
webmobdev wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it is a question of choosing the right license - AGPL.

Yeah, it always confuses me when people release something under e.g. the BSD or MIT license and then complain about "freeloaders." It's totally understandable to not want companies to profit off of proprietary, closed-source forks of your software. I get it! But there are licenses that you can use to stop that from ever happening (namely [A]GPL). Why not use one of those?

I tried adding one perspective above :), maybe that provides some insight

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#83

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

adoxyz wrote: post #5

Nothing wrong with this imo. I actually hope more open source projects start with a business source license if their ultimate goal is to become a SaaS platform. I think we've seen time and time again large enterprises abusing the spirit of open source for their own monetary gain, contributing nothing back, and just acting in bad faith.

> I actually hope more open source projects start with a business source license

Well, by definition they wouldn't be open source projects then. But yes, better to make that clear from the start.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#84

Post by zaphirplane »

toenail wrote: post #51
Barrin92 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people start open source businesses under the good faith assumption that competitors will be fair and that the people who do the actual work capture the value, and that people genuinely contribute back. License technicalities don't matter. If people use permissive licenses as an excuse to justify an ecosystem that is parasitic any such system will die out, it cannot sustain itself.

If your business can't succeed using an open source license you made poor business choices. Own it, don't blame the license or the open source community.

You make it sound the licence is infallible The licence could be the problem in how the competitors are operating and leaching

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#85

Post by ikiris »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #65
webmobdev wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it is a question of choosing the right license - AGPL.

Yeah, it always confuses me when people release something under e.g. the BSD or MIT license and then complain about "freeloaders." It's totally understandable to not want companies to profit off of proprietary, closed-source forks of your software. I get it! But there are licenses that you can use to stop that from ever happening (namely [A]GPL). Why not use one of those?

because most of their desired customers ban AGPL usage.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#86

Post by yellowapple »

not_a_bot2890 wrote: post #63
yellowapple wrote: post #39

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.

> That nobody has tried suggests paranoia at best. That's hardly paranoia. Why wait until you need to change it under pressure from one of the big CSPs (a la Elastic/AWS)? It is proactive at best.

AWS in particular already has its own competing services that predate or otherwise do not derive from Hashicorp's offerings (CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, etc.). Same with pretty much every other major cloud provider. The whole point of going with Vault or Consul or Terraform or what have you is to not tie oneself to a particular provider's offerings.

Put simply: Hashicorp's target market for a given product is largely not going to be interested in a cloud provider's locked-down equivalent, and a cloud provider is not going to be interested in deprecating its own tightly-integrated product in favor of customizing some third-party offering.

And again: if this was a legitimate fear, then the AGPL already fully addresses it.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#87

Post by davorak »

toenail wrote: post #25
adoxyz wrote: post #5

Nothing wrong with this imo. I actually hope more open source projects start with a business source license if their ultimate goal is to become a SaaS platform. I think we've seen time and time again large enterprises abusing the spirit of open source for their own monetary gain, contributing nothing back, and just acting in bad faith.

Abusing the spirit of open source, what? If somebody doesn't want any competitors they should have read the licenses and understood them, and not simply used open source as a buzzword for marketing purposes.

Not having competition is not the problem I have seen listed when abuse is talked about. It is not contributing back in ways that are promotional to how much the company is benefiting. Or not going out of their way to acknowledge that they started with someone else's open source project, not even something like an academic citation.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#88

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Barrin92 wrote: post #67
toenail wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your business can't succeed using an open source license you made poor business choices. Own it, don't blame the license or the open source community.

If I have to pay developers, operate a business, allocate time and money to create value and take the risk that comes with it, and you come and take my work unchanged, strip all atribution and mereley resell it, then I can't succeed by definition. The most talented businessman on earth cannot. If that's what you think open source is, it'll vanish. No commercial system can exist like that and it should not because it…

> and you come and take my work unchanged, strip all atribution and mereley resell it, then

If they strip all attribution, then you can just take them to court for violating the license; other than public domain and WTFPL, even the most permissive licenses (BSD/MIT/Apache) still require attribution.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#89

Post by arianvanp »

peppermint_gum wrote: post #36

It is important to understand that there are two kinds of open-source software: - Software made by startups that are precious to HN. In this case, building a business on top of them is "freeloading" and it's deeply immoral. Examples: Elastic, HashiCorp, Mongo - "Public good software", there's nothing wrong with profiting from it, in fact, it's encouraged. Examples: Linux, Postgres, Nginx, Apache

I don't think nginx is a good example though. They have a lot of features they refuse to get contributed as they want them paywalled in nginx-plus

Like service discovery and better load balancing algorithms.

Re: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

#90

Post by toomuchtodo »

version_five wrote: post #81
toomuchtodo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argue the window is moving as to what “open source” means out of survival. Source available is the new open source, and what young technologists will grow up grinding on. You’ll have folks complain about it during the transition (as happens with any Overton window sort of event), but they’ll move on eventually and a new crop of tech industry will grow up with this as the new normal. Change is inevitable, broadly sp…

I agree except I think it's our of short term greed plus arrogance rather than survival. Maybe in some cases that's not true, but when companies like Meta are championing pretend open source, it's not existential for them, it's trying to push for a world where they have more control. Like I said, I don't have a problem with closed source business models, it's the deliberate conflation that's troubling, especially whe…

I encourage you to continue to complain. Sometimes it’s the only way the rest of us have signal we might be wrong.
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