What HashiCorp’s license change means for our customers
spacelift.io
spacelift.io
HashiCorp adopts Business Source License - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306 - Aug 2023 (599 comments)
Hear, hear! (edited, thx)
EDIT: Also, if you are contributing to open source, read carefully before submitting that PR. Do not contribute to projects that make you agree to a CLA. It's becoming more and more common for projects to include one or two lines in the README and that's it. All your code are belong to us. I don't know if that would hold up, but why contribute your time and effort?
I don't understand why GPL gets so much hate on HN.
I fail to see what is unrealistic about that, or indeed user-unfriendly, unless you consider the user to be the developer and not the person on the other end of the wire.
You can wait for the first person to request the source and do it then manually (or link to the nginx github).
Most likely that will never happen for most people who deploy it.
After all it's a pretty good price for what you are getting in exchange.
So, it's legally ambiguous, and since no-one has legally tested the waters the interpretation of the license can be very different, but most people prefer to stay away from AGPL code altogether.
By the way, the SSPL isn't free or open source, so lumping it in with the GPL and AGPL like that could easily mislead people.
Reminds me of the picture of the smug cat surrounded by knives. GPL is that cat.
It's a lawyer's job to imagine the worst future outcomes and guard against them in the present.
Everybody focuses on "It's crazy you put that clause in there that was never needed," but few folks appreciate "Thank god we included that clause just in case."
Which isn't to opine there's a right or wrong, only multiple parties each negotiating (skillfully or poorly) in their own interests.
If you're a developer and don't want your code to slide into corporate controlled ownership... well, there are licenses for that.
https://github.com/readme/guides/open-source-licensing
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02/how-to-choose-an-ope...
As a rough analogy that my lawyer told me early on, lawyers are like software engineers, and the law is like the operating system. A good lawyer writes robust "code" designed to deal with edge cases and unexpected conditions gracefully.
One of the worst mistakes you can make in life is believing anyone who says things like "oh, that's just boilerplate...we'd never act on it" or "don't worry, we would never enforce that" or similar. That's someone who is deliberately setting you up to get screwed.
If they refuse to remove it, it’s because they want to retain the right to enforce it.
The legal system isn't a computer that has deterministic outputs.
And when going up against an adversary with hordes of lawyers on salary, you don't want to end up in court.
For instance an non compete clause which is not limited to a certain geographic area is invalid, period. Yet some companies apparently don't know this. They copy paste boilerplate which doesn't hold up in court.
And no court can rule against this as the supreme court has already decided what makes a non compete clause valid and it is very precise in the requirements.
AGPL is possibly the only one that could guard against the latter, but it brings with it other limitations the author may not want. It almost certainly cuts down on the pool of contributors. While it fixes one problem, it creates others.
I think the fundamental problem is that open source licenses apply equally to everyone and really only govern what you can do with source modifications. The proposed solutions seem to be of the form "make it onerous to use and sell commercial licenses on the side." But, I don't think that's really what many people want. For one, it changes the business model. Moreover, they don't want something that restrictive for most parties. It's just that "don't bite the hand that feeds" is hard to codify.
At the core of it, these folks want something that functions like open source for the majority case but affords protection in the extreme. It has little to do with the ideals of software freedom. For better or worse, the BSL attempts to address that problem.
I think we largely overestimate how much the average person even cares about open source. I can only speak to my own experiences, but most devs I know haven't even read the major open source licenses. And that extends to how they consume source. Plenty of them take code from public repos without any declared license. They crib answers from Stack Overflow without attribution. They never check the licenses of their full dependency graph. Unless the legal team requires explicit approval of adoption of new open source projects, they don't go through that exercise. What they want is something they don't have to pay for that they can easily modify; open source happens to satisfy that problem.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I'm not sure the BSL will clear legal approval at many companies. So, the companies using the license may find it's not any more advantageous than GPL. After all, if devs can't use your software, you haven't really gained anything. But, I'm curious to see how this all plays out. It's the first concerted attempt at solving a problem that open source licenses don't solve in a satisfactory way for many of us.
https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
its really quite simple, you're no worse off than if there were no GPL/AGPL to begin with, so just dont use it if you dont agree.
I personally am very concerned with the newer trends of going away from GPL, I think its gonna turn out bad for everyone
It's time the OSS community stop making free software with a loose license such that control and ownership is taken from them, and for profit to be made without any give backs.
The problem is entitlement and thinking that anyone owes you anything after you have given software away to the world. It's no longer yours, there is no "back".
If some software provides value, it will eventually be monetized in some form. It makes no sense for a corporation, whose entire existence is predicated on monetization, to see GPL software and say “I guess I’ll just stop charging for our products!” Instead, the completely predictable response is “this is valuable, but I can’t use it, so I’m going to make something like it that I can actually use”.
Like it or not, you cannot “hide” value from capitalism. The machine will find and extract value wherever it can. GPL establishes unrealistic ideals for software that are inconsistent with the reality of how and where it is used.
what's wrong with that?
If they produce their own version, then the world now has another piece of software, and this competition is going to make the ecosystem better imho.
The only problem with lenient licenses is that they allow leeching. MIT, eclipse, and apache licenses, all are basically allow free commons which others leech off as much as possible. The corps may continue to contribute, but only because they see value they could extract more than what it costs them.
I would say AGPL should be the _only_ license anyone contributing to OSS should pick. And if you own the project, make it dual licensed - a commercial offering, and AGPL. If said software is good, a commercial offering can be profit generating enough fund further development.
millions of people use it. the perennial question is why does the license make people so unreasonably angry?
>there’s a reason corps tend to avoid it
it's the same reason they try to assign IP you dreamt up in the shower to themselves in perpetuity with no exceptions - a combination of corporate greed, hubris and lawyerly risk aversion.
People tend not to like it because it’s restrictive to the point of being off limits in many real world use cases. Bob works on the platform team at at GigaCorp. He’s overworked, and found a great OSS product that does exactly what he needs and could save him weeks or months of effort. Except because it’s GPL, he can’t touch it.
so it's worth the time, and thus money to pay. Therefore, if he's got a brain, he would ask for corporate money to buy a commercial license, and do away with the risks of GPL.
Except he doesn't, because the corp (or he himself) believes that it should be free somehow?
Bob could just whine at the developer, of course, for not making his day at a well paid job slightly easier.
But the only reason for such anti-GPL policies is so that the corporations can ensure their software remains proprietary, which is inherently wrong.
There is people arguing both ways with relatively good arguments, but what about quantifiable realities? As the author of GPL-licensed softwares, I didn't have much reasons to go that way or another, apart from hunch. Can we quantify those effects, so that we can properly align our licenses with the effect we want?
Of course, not everything is an optimization problem. So even if the metrics are better for x or y in general, people have their own reasons and beliefs about the world that might make one or the other better. I have generally felt that unless restrictiveness is important to you, minimally restrictive licensing is a good default choice.
Profit isn't a concern to someone who wishes to publish open source software, in fact you could say Open Source is an inherently socialist venture (your socializing the tools/means to do something).
The AGPL3 makes it more difficult for others with probably more means to profit on that work, so it's a net benefit to the folks who actually write code (and a detriment to those who would wish to exploit it).
I find the EUPL is a much better replacement for what a lot of people expect the AGPL to be, with the added benefit of being compatible with a bunch of other licenses by yielding when specific clauses intersect.
Why would you want to open a bunch of loopholes for very specific and complex cases?
Can you link to that requirement?
> prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network [...] an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source
A little off topic, but how are these audits usually done? I'd like to familiarize myself
Not necessarily your specific case, if there's a resource online that'd be fine
https://wiki.debian.org/CopyrightReviewTools https://scancode-licensedb.aboutcode.org/
You can also run an audit against your artifact store/cache if you have one. JFrog Artifactory has built-in tools for auditing dependencies (and can act as a pull through cache) so you can run reports that way but it can be harder to tie dependencies to what's using them.
Back when I worked at Chase, it was against company policy so use 3rd party dependencies that weren't in their internal components database. Part of getting something in the components database was establishing an owner, the license, and the version (basically a paperwork/approval process). In addition, part of the deploy process was running a vulnerability check against your dependencies using some proprietary enterprise software that tracked CVEs and could (somewhat...) parse what dependencies an application was using (ideally, automatically...).
* Migrate a legacy GEOINT system from on-prem hardware to Amazon C2S (the CIA's private version of AWS)
* Migrate the distributed runtime from Apache Felix (a Java OSGI implementation) to Kubernetes
* Split the algorithmic part of the processing flow from the metadata retrieval and orchestration part and assign the algorithmic part to another contractor (which was even more pointless, because that contractor just sub-contracted the actual development work back to Raytheon because we were the only people on the planet with a realistic level of expertise to do it)
This went about as well as you might expect, with roughly zero people on the project knowing anything about how AWS worked, zero people knowing anything about how Kubernetes worked, C2S having a barren subset of AWS services, and the FOSS approvals taking nearly a year to work through the backlog before that part of the team could do anything except prototype shit in an isolated sandbox.
So yeah, I left years ago, but I think they finally ended up delivering a small subset of the originally intended functionality something like three years late.
Here's google's policy on it. https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
No it doesn't. The extra section of the AGPL that the GPL doesn't have explicitly says it only applies if you do modify it.
> Its universally banned not just startups.
You linked me to the rule that it's banned at Google, but still not to the source of any rule that it's banned at any startups.
And I don't think the MPL would even prevent them from selling their commercial products.
[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/introducing-a-cla
[2] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#Compatib...
This is the same for database companies like Redis and Elastic.
Open source has become a weapon used by the giants. This isn't about OSS anymore. It's about the largest companies in our industry setting compensation and soaking up all the profits.
I'd say an IC at one of these companies deserves more than an IC at Amazon and should see outsized reward. But that's not what's happening.
No one forced them to be open source. They did it for certain benefits. They would have gone nowhere in the early days with this new license, most likely. I can only see these moves as bait and switch. Encourage everyone to use it, allow and maybe even encourage companies to build offerings on top of it to help with traction/mindshare... and then oh btw we changed our mind. It may be their right, but I'm glad people are talking about the implications.
The Amazons of the world don't have to pay a fair price for the software that they use and also get to sell at exceptionally high prices.
TBH, that last part is still somewhat of a mystery to me. How did the market evolve to such a place that large infrastructure providers can command huge gross margins? Shouldn't that be a highly commoditized part of the supply chain?
Not many companies are “big enough to sue” at a scale that you can roll your entire brand or operation onto and know it won’t be acquired or “private equitied” tomorrow, and so it consolidates down to the major players.
Those are the factors that count for enterprise buyers.
AWS can roll out an open source tool and get massive adoption because it’s rolling out an insured product, essentially. They often even have issues or less capabilities, but it comes with support and a assumption guarantee of general availability and so aggregates and reduces the risk for large buyers.
Amazon is now large enough that they compete or think about competing in every profitable vertical out there.
If you're an enterprise in a profitable market, amazon's a competitor now or will be soon.
Closing all the source when others have contributed is just a dick move.
Elastic is even more interesting here. There are plenty of anecdotes about Elastic purchasing being complicated and confusing. In addition, for the first few years of existence, AWS Elastic was missing some basic features (afaik you couldn't scale your cluster or something similar). In fact, AWS is now maintaining their own fork of Elasticsearch.
The worst part is the gentle giants such as Amazon can completely abuse HashiCorp's open source license and pull all the customers to AWS internal products, leaving HashiCorp out in the cold.
HashiCorp is doing the correct thing here.
Terraform itself is not a product (Terraform Cloud is), it's a language, similar to Go with which it's built. Building on top of a language does not imply the necessity of contributing to the language itself. In fact, it was very hard to contribute to hashicorp/terraform because PRs were not getting accepted, not even reviewed, just closed by a bot.
I believe both us and our competitors contributed to the ecosystem and the community by building providers, modules, tools (like env0's excellent Terratag), reproducing and reporting bugs, or evangelizing best practices.
The way I see this move is as if Go was still owned by Google and one day Google decided it would change its license to ban any companies building anything that Google calls competitive from using the language.
To claim it solely exists because of open source is a falsehood. Companies that can’t make money don’t exist.
It's clear where Terraform et al. are now that they don't need to be open source (hence why they are switching off of open source licenses without fear) but what is not well-supported by any evidence is that it would've gone the same way if it had started as shared source or closed source.
By holding smaller companies to this OSS purity yardstick, we're allowing the Amazons of the world to clone them wholesale and reap all of the benefits.
The world needs more small companies, not big ones. This is the right way for small companies to protect themselves.
That’s pure Free Software, and it would require Amazon to publish their changes or not offer the service. In reality they would probably choose the latter.
I don't have the same complaints about many open source business models, because they do not involve deception. If you contribute to Gitlab CE, it is still properly open source even if it may benefit Gitlab EE customers. BSL is not an open source license though, so Terraform is no longer an open source project. Does that matter to enterprises? Nope. Does that matter to me? I think you know the answer to that.
But it's yet another harsh lesson that you should never, ever sign a CLA outside of stuff you contribute as a result of your job. If you ever sign a CLA for work you're not being paid for, you're clearly getting scammed in slow motion.
And if abusing the goodwill that comes with open source (or maybe came with, at this point, since now we all see where this is headed from here on out) is the only way for not every company to be Amazon, maybe there's some much larger problem going on there.
It does matter to the sysadmins in those corporations, e.g. me. We happily pay vendors, but not to be baited and switched.
> To claim it solely exists because of open source is a falsehood. Companies that can’t make money don’t exist.
This is a logical fallacy. Saying that something wouldn't exist if it weren't for something is not the same as saying it solely exists because of that thing. I wouldn't exist if it weren't for my mom. Obviously that's true and very different than saying I solely exist because of my mom. The former points out something that contributed to existence but is silent on any other contributions. The latter would be big news.
Even if you disagree with some of these points, it really depends on the CLA. Some CLAs allow the contributor to retain copyright and also restrict relicensing.
Would you appreciate being able to tell their product manager you need a feature and see it shipped?
Would you appreciate time with their engineering team suggesting how to implement the feature so it works for your use case?
Would you value the feature working precisely as you need it to, with no misinterpretation?
Then sign the CLA and value this vendor offers business-source as a shortcut for you and them to understand and ship your needs, when most vendors don't. It's a literal win win.
(The only time not to sign is if you would prefer a competitor to the vendor, or want to compete yourself. Then go talk to that competitor instead, or make the first commit to your own repo.)
Signed-off-by: someone who has a recent commit in the kernel and did not sign a CLA.
There's nothing wrong with a CLA's existence, it just depends what it says. For example, the Caddy CLA [0] is borrowed from The Linux Foundation, and it basically says you either made the change originally, or have the rights to share the contribution, and that this goes into a public record and will be redistributed.
So you think no one should contribute to the Linux Foundation’s projects? This is absurd. CLAs are not evil on their own, only their contents could be objectionable.
Not everyone will be doing it for the love of building software.
From a business context it can frequently be cheaper to fix OSS (or source-available software) than pay someone in-house to write something equivalent or pay for equivalent commercial software. If you're being paid by your employer to complete a task on company time, that task uses Terraform and you encounter a Terraform bug, it seems reasonable to create a fix for it.
It gets even hairier when you consider a lot of commercial products push Terraform support (in house created providers) as a feature. I could be getting paid by Company A to implement and maintain software written by Company B where part of the implementation uses a reference architecture or install template written in Terraform.
On the other hand, I'm more reluctant to use those sorts of tools/contribute on my own time.
I really do wonder if barring people from innovating around Terraform, such a strangle will just lead to the emergence of a Terraform replacement in the next years.
Instead of buying spacelift or the competition and moving ahead, this solves... nothing?
I don't think they deserve the status they have.
Those tools however were better early on when we were all managing our own EC2 instances. Most people are moving on from that in one way or another (fargate, kubernetes, lamba, etc.). They aren't as useful with the newer tech and Hashicorp doesn't have a cloud offering that's competitive. No moat so to speak. That's an unfortunate turn of events for them.
Improving the developer experience around Terraform is worthwhile, but just not that valuable. The experience is already good enough. I write Terraform daily. Its weird sometimes, but fine once you get used to it. Never been impressed with Terraform Cloud the times I've tried it. The open source ecosystem is a little wild west sometimes, but great overall.
I wish they'd looked at building something higher order on top of it. Imagine if their premium offering abstracted Terraform away entirely. With their technical expertise they could build a platform where you built infrastructure like Legos. Eliminate the need to write Terraform. Reduce the need to understand the nuances of the cloud providers and any other provider they choose to support. Provide premium options that have certain compliance guarantees. If done well, this could print money.
I'm sure there are tons of other things they could do that'd have companies begging them to take their money. What is happening?
What a time to be alive.
Repo: https://github.com/fmeringdal/covert Examples: https://github.com/fmeringdal/covert/tree/main/examples
Any way to get notified about the release?
Also: will this be a straight port, or could it also support "live-replication" from S3, instead of just on-demand restores? https://github.com/backtrace-labs/verneuil supports this. Sadly it isn't very actively maintained and buggy.
It will mostly be a straight port as I think that is the optimal way to rewrite a codebase from one language to another. First step is to do an almost line by line copy paste from Go to Rust and then port the test suite and get that passing. At this point I would do a major refactoring where I can rely on the test suite to make sure I don't break anything and ensure the codebase is idiomatic Rust. Once that is done we can start extending the project with additional features.
Live replication from S3 sounds cool so please open a more detailed GH issue to describe the use-case for it once the repo is public!
HashiCorp first increased Terraform Cloud prices and now makes more moves to commercialise their products.
For community it makes sense to fork, rebrand and keep open-source. This time under Apache foundation or CNCF. Well you do not need rapidly evolve Terraform, few small vendors and enthusiast would be able to do that.
Probably true regarding entirely new features, but I think just keeping up with all the different API changes across the modules would be a massive amount of work in itself.
Provide some tool to verify compatibility, but in general the goal is for open-source to be the standard, not HashiCorp flavour.
Your goal is to convince the most popular Hashicorp providers that you are the standard and build the community.
I start with the assumption that most companies want to use managed services for their infrastructure. This makes sense, because the marginal cost for (eg) AWS to provide the managed service is basically nothing over the cost of the underlying infrastructure (because at that scale you have to automate the management and can’t have a human in a loop for anything routine). But for the company using that service, the cost is non-zero since they likely don’t have that automation in place and have to have expensive humans do that work. So in a reasonably efficient market, managed infrastructure should be the correct financial decision (and I tend to think that the popularity of it implies that things are generally working that way).
So if you want to use a managed service, it’s fine if you’re dealing with something that is (eg) MIT licensed because you can expect a healthy competitive market for running it as a managed service. But now you look at something like elasticsearch, and at this point what benefit do I have from using it over Amazon’s OpenSearch fork? I’m just as locked in if I use elastic since their license precludes anyone else from providing it as a managed service which is a fundamental requirement of my usage of the tool.
Idk, I could be wrong! But I really don’t know what the path forward is for this model.
As someone who has worked on IAAS with terraform, I am not sure if I can recommend it anymore. I'll have to talk to my manager about our use of it to make sure we are "compatible" with the license, which is far too vague.
... Too bad. I liked terraform.
The article ended so abruptly I wondered if there was an issue with my browser rendering the content.
Putting my cynical hat on, if I were running Hashicorp, I would be happy to give cheap licenses to anyone who wants one right now. The danger for Hashicorp is that people might fork Terraform and create a competitor. Right now, with the PR around the license change, is the most likely time for a fork to happen. It would be better to kill off competitors one by one, by raising prices slowly.
Spacelift must know this is a danger, though. So it might be better to fork even if there's a cheap license on offer.
They've partnered with ALL of the largest industry giants in the cloud space. That must give them a pretty strong sense of security
Pick your favorite.
[0] https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4810:yj...
There's real reasons to do this. It stops exactly what HashiCorp is doing, and you are likely giving HashiCorp the ability to take your code without giving back.
> When someone combines a file or files licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0 ("MPL") with a project licensed under the GNU General Public License or Lesser General Public Licenses ("(L)GPL"), the MPL's Section 3.3 allows distribution of the combined work (the "Larger Work") subject to the terms of both licenses, as long as certain conditions are met.
Once a file has been distributed under both the (L)GPL and the MPL, recipients of that file can later distribute it solely under the terms of the (L)GPL, in accordance with the terms of that license. If a project wishes to do this, and not to allow others to use their version of this file under the MPL, the project can indicate its decision by deleting the MPL headers described in Exhibit A of the license and replacing them with the standard notice recommended by the (L)GPL. Copyright notices indicating authorship of the file should be retained.
... So you combine with GPL code, and then, say "I don't want to use the MPL."
Is this really so complicated? All updates to be done in the future are licensed under the GPL.
The only firm that benefits from the MPL here is Hashicorp, which is the company that the fork is being done against. Fork it and be done... It isn't like the MPL code can integrate with the BSL code.
Should you ever distribute binaries, you also need to do a better job than HashiCorp of obeying the license terms of your dependencies around attribution.
Finally, as someone who has actually done the job of core maintenance of Terraform, I suspect you are also vastly underestimating the amount of work involved. I just set a reminder to look at this fork in 3 months, I’d put money on it being dead.
This one particularly irks me though:
> Can they do it? > Yes, they can. They required every contributor to Terraform to sign a CLA that allowed this.
This is untrue, and only covers contributions since the CLA was added, many years after Terraform was started. I for one have never signed it.
> Can they do it? Yes, they can.
Yes, on a per-file basis.
Hashicorp changing the Terraform terms.... absolute dick move.
Terraform is not an open souce service; it's a library. You can't just "clone and run as service" when it comes to terraform.
Using GitHub Actions to deploy your Terraform code (you becoming the third party) is competitive with HashiCorp's products. There is no delineation about commercialization.
HashiCorp probably won't come after you, but to me it shows this wasn't really thought through or it's maliciously ambiguous.
In every case, the same people made the same mistakes with other tools. A common trait was that they [incorrectly] thought they were rock star developers and boring details like how their code actually runs were beneath them so they wasted huge amounts of time on deep module structures (or with CDK, elaborate TypeScript hierarchies) but resisted learning how the AWS resources they used actually worked.
Much easier to hand them Terraform and reject anything with local-exec provisioner, the official worst piece of terraform.
Though of course there's also teams that run ansible from it with lots of implicit settings, making it a pain to move from dev machines to CI.
Anyway, nobody will use Terraform if it only supports the 3 major cloud providers! The beauty comes with the GitHub provider, maintained by GitHub, with the PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ providers, maintained by a solo developer, the MySQL, Cloudflare, Opsgenie, Pagerduty, and tons of others, not touched by HashiCorp. Those third parties do this, because of the open nature of Terraform. Now that HashiCorp is changing its model, because it's unable to sustain its business due to its high TFC pricing that doesn't even support its own CDKTF, I suspect a fork may happen, or Terraform itself could be reimplemented with better core than the current one, which is maintained by a couple of developers.
Terraform is a huge missed potential and it has so many limitations like not being able to use variables in a bunch of places, the orchestration with depends_on being so limited, the unstable chaining of resource outputs to provider configuration, etc.
Ex:
> Nobody is accusing GitHub of exploiting the Git ecosystem.
Because git is not an open source product. It is an open source project.
Open source projects tend toward "free software".
Open source products do not.
Which side of that you think is being "bad" depends on what you value, I guess.
Many of these shenanigans would probably not occur if the giants with billions in revenue who got there through the use of open source products would make relevant financial contributions to the companies behind the open source products. (Nevermind supporting the open source projects, too.)
A trajectory question: how much has Hashi been steering Terraform? Given that companies, especially those who offer Terraform as a product, have been using Terraform for so many years, they should have enough expertise to develop on the current version of Terraform without upgrading to the ones with BSL. Of course, sadly Terraform as a single product would diverge into many variants.
Companies want it for free, and individuals don't have enough luxury time to be able to do it themselves.
Prove me wrong and help patch or fund https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and you'll have an even better replacement for terraform!
I'm not going to argue about the ethical considerations, but in terms of your engineering a product that may have the floor drop out from under it, _that_ doesn't ethically seem right.
https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/blob/main/LICENSE
So I lived to see when Amazon's offering is more open than Hashicorp's...
Can you use CDK to deploy to say Azure or GCP ?
If it's limited only to AWS, even if someone offers a better version, Amazon still wins at the end of the day.
> Beyond Terraform 1.5.5, direct HashiCorp competitors will be unable to incorporate the source code or embed or distribute newer versions of Terraform.
You can integrate Terraform, you just need a commercial license....
Paying for a license to embed their products in yours will be sky high thereby steering the end users to go straight for HashiCorp.
Check out my fork of Vagrant: Vagrunt! Still with the MIT open source license. Pull request welcome.
I understand how "open vagrant" or "vagrant reloaded" would be a violation, but I'm not sure if "vagrunt" would be, unless we think it's close enough to be confused with the original spelling?
"Vagrunt" is indeed a clever and suitable name that closely resembles "Vagrant" while changing just one character. It maintains the familiarity with the original name while also indicating a slight twist that makes it distinct for your fork of the application. Well done!
Given that "vagrunt" and "vagrant" sound similar and, in your hypothetical, provide the same service, there's a good chance that using "vagrunt" could raise trademark concerns.
I'm not sure Hashicorp have a trademark here, but the names are awfully close. Think of the pronunciation: I am sure in plenty of localations the words are pronounced identically, let alone very similarly.
Seems most suitable to execute "viagrunt up" ;-)
Vagrunt is no different other than it's been "created" post license changes.
As someone who is a direct competitor to Hashicorp, why would I use this over making my own fork?
But I'm guessing no one gets promoted for DX improvements, when there's AI editors to screenshot launch!1!
I know CloudFormation gets shit upon, but for a lot of use cases it is very low drama, and (most important to me personally) it enables one-click deploys into customer accounts https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui... without involving "first, open your terminal ..."
This is your reminder that you shouldn't make nontrivial contributions to projects that require CLAs like theirs. Instead, find or create a copyleft fork without one and contribute there instead.
Second, is that you typically only need to sign it once, and you might later even forget that you signed it wham making some small contribution and don't own any copyright.
1) I resonate with the spirit of the change, that too many companies are making vast sums of money on the backs of open source contributors who work largely for free
2) Changing open source licenses is just exactly the wrong way to redistribute wealth
To me, these little jabs against conceptual simplicity undermine the spirit of human progress. They're like code smells. So for example, GPLv3 thinly veils DRM, which opens the door to monopoly, surveillance capitalism and big brother because it can never be made to work without infringing on individual freedom in some way.
A better way to solve the problem of wealth inequality is to codify wealth redistribution into law. This is what taxes are. Rather than nickel and diming our psyches with licensing baggage, it's better for us as a whole to just feed some portion of our proceeds back into the system so that everyone else can eat too. This is the long game that we've been forfeiting since we put all of our chips into greed-is-good crony capitalism which started around 1980.
I believe that stuff like the current Hollywood writers' strike is a canary in the coal mine for capitalist history. With the arrival of AI, our monetary system is going to collapse between (pulling numbers out of the air) 2030 and 2040. Money will fall in value to such a degree that a house will cost $1 million while the minimum wage is still $10 or less. Because robots can work for free, we can't.
Enough with the personal responsibility dogma. It's time for systemic change.
Edit: perhaps it's unclear exactly how GPLv3 gets too nosy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/9m4n2g/lin...
So I'm objecting to the BSL saying "this is open source unless you're our competitor".
Edit 2: after thinking about this some more, I believe that in an information economy, code will become synonymous with the means of production. So UBI is an open source license that says a company can make unlimited money, as long as it gives some back to society. So there's no way to be anti-tax and pro-open source without cognitive dissonance.
What do you mean by this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
I feel that the original vision of most open source licenses was to allow anyone to sell open source software, with the condition that any changes be fed back to contributors. That self-limits how much profit anyone can make on the backs of others, because any value added eventually goes back into the system. This is how it worked back in the Red Hat Linux days.
But today it's impractical to modify the software on locked devices running open source software, like cell phones. And we have video game consoles whose software is notoriously difficult to modify because they run DRM, and their games built on open source software are also copy protected. And most open source software runs on web servers now, walled away from us and unsold, so that changes don't always get fed back into the system.
Put all of this together, and I can't help but feel that the GPL protects the DRM status quo. That may not have been intentional, but here we are. I view any restriction or even inconvenience on the user (where jailbreaked devices work better), or dictating what users can do with their software or devices, as DRM. That stuff should never be allowed to use open source software.
And even linking to GPL code can infect non-GPL software with the GPL license, forcing users to decide if they want to use the LGPL instead. I find this distinction so exhausting to reason about and unnecessarily open to legal challenge that I usually avoid the (L)GPL altogether.
I would have preferred to see a license derived from MIT with a new clause that says if you sell or distribute the software in a locked device, then any changes must be fed back to developers. But maybe GPLv3 is as close as we can get. And it still doesn't solve the problem of open source software locked behind web servers. But maybe it's important to preserve the freedom to do that, as Linus Torvalds said in that video: that it's none of our business what people do with our software (<- as long as they don't sell a modified version without feeding changes back).
And admittedly, IANAL so I might be reading this all wrong. Here are the best links I could find:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html
https://www.ifross.org/?q=en/what-difference-between-gplv2-a...
https://lwn.net/Articles/200651/
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynami...
No, it was MPL-2.0, which is permissive, so anyone including HashiCorp can start a BSL, or all right reserved, or whatever fork. Nothing to do with CLA. Doing whatever they want with it is entirely consistent with the ideals of a permissive license. If you don’t want people to do whatever they want with your code contributions, don’t contribute to a permissive project.