HashiCorp switched Vault from MPL to BSL license yesterday. The terms of how they define "competitive" products are pretty vague, which means that any commercial product that uses Vault under the hood is at risk of violating the terms of the new license. Moreover, even if it's not violating the terms of license now, it doesn't mean that HashiCorp will not change its mind in future.

Ultimately, it just means that HashiCorp is not an open source company anymore. One of the biggest benefits of open source is building on top of open source software to create even better software. HashiCorp's move makes it impossible and simply slows down innovation. In fact, in their blog post, they say that they will start referring to their previously-open-source product as "community".

Infisical is an open source alternative to HashiCorp Vault. The main difference is that it provides more tools in one platform. Some examples of these are automatic secret scanning and leak prevention, CLI for local development, integrations with services like GitHub Actions, Circle CI, etc.

The core of Infisical is available under the MIT license with only very few features being enterprise-licensed – some will say it's not ideal but at least this type of license does not impose legal risks on our users while gives us the ability to monetize the product efficiently and support the open source (MIT-based) part of the product.

Over the last year, lots of developers and companies of all sizes (from tiny startups to Fortune 10 companies) have partially or fully switched to Infisical. For them, we now process over 300 million secrets per month.

Check out our git repo here: https://github.com/Infisical/infisical