HashiCorp switching to BSL shows a need for open charter companies
opencoreventures.com
opencoreventures.com
The only thing you are losing is (perhaps) the ability to continue to receive free patches and updates from the project. This is no different than if the company went out of business completely. You can still make your own updates to the last OS version, and you are free to solicit contributions from others to your fork.
Is Hashicorp switching to a BSL any more disruptive to users of the software than if Hashicorp went out of business?
I would be surprised if more than a tiny fraction of their customers do so.
Most businesses don't like to take vague legal risks.
Yes. If they went out of the business, the software development would probably grind to halt before/unless the community manages to rescue the project.
But if they don't, and instead they "just" change to a license which states you cannot be a competitor and use the project, then that runs the risk of you being sued and pulled into legal battles with another company, usually something you'd like to avoid.
So imagine I today use nomad for something, and Hashicorp doesn't have any hosted version of nomad, so I'm in the clear. But who knows what will happen in the future? As soon as Hashicorp does anything that could look like competition to what I already offer, my usage of nomad is now at risk, and in addition my entire business is at risk because they would sue me unless I remove nomad quickly.
It would be stupid not to move far away from any BSL projects as soon as you can, unless your entire business model is to get into legal battles with others.
With them changing to BSL, all updates to the MPL version stopped immediately when the change was announced. Your runway is now exactly up to the point where a critical vulnerability is discovered and puts your project and your clients at risk. Or you tread into uncertain legal territory and hope that they don't try to smite you while you figure out what to use next.
That can also happen without the company going out of business, the community's efforts simply need to be based on the last version before the license change. See for instance how OpenZFS development continues even though Oracle is still around.
With Hashicorp, the project is still "open source" but under a license that makes it potentially dangerous to any competitors. That makes it much harder for a fork to operate without exposing itself to legal risk. For example if any of the code implemented on the fork after the change was too similar to code by Hashicorp that could open the fork devs up to a legal battle.
With ZFS that was never a concern since the new changes weren't publicly available on the closed source version and importantly all the brains behind the project promptly quit to work on the open source version instead.
It's hard to avoid people contributing similar or identical code, and thus violating the BSL license.
Eh. Forking a still-OSS version is an actual fork, where taking over development if they got bus-factored wouldn't be.
This is true, but depending on the company, they may shutdown their distribution of the older releases, so if you don't have an archive, you're out of luck; possibly very quickly with zero notice. Had they gone out of business, chances are there were signs that might have lead you to start an archive ahead of time. git makes things a bit easier, as it's an archive by default, but if there were useful documents outside of git, that's an issue.
Want to keep running that old package? Cross an ubuntu versioning chasm and now you also need an ancient version of glibc which won't run on your Zany Zamboni fleet because your other requirement of libxml 5 won't work with it. Find a security problem? Well there's a newer version that's only been out for four minutes why aren't you on that already anyway? Oh we don't publish packages for your 4 week old npm yarn bower neonode, who still uses that?
use the win32 binary under Wine
And this then causes the "Red Queen's race"[0], similarly to animal evolution, where if you don't adapt to the ecosystem, you go extinct.
Some projects put in that work (e.g., PostgreSQL), but it comes at a significant tax on productivity that could otherwise be put into new features.
Backward compatibility requires some care, but it's not exactly hard. Simply don't change interfaces or exposed behavior. You can always add new APIs, just don't break the current ones.
The only time it is hard is when there is a security vulnerability that is difficult to fix without breaking compatibility. But that's not very often.
I came of age in the culture of never, ever breaking compatibility. You'd get raked over the coals in design meetings for ever voicing such forbidden thoughts. It's a wonderful approach because everything just keeps working. As it should be. The software industry needs to grow up to what it used to be.
Gonna be a hilarious ride when it breaks.
So really you have until HashiCorp changes the interface between TF core and the providers, which would mean something like a Terraform v2.0.
All of the company's work to date remains available free and in perpetuity. The complaint can only be that the company has changed course and will not commit to providing future new stuff for free. The only way this complaint is valid is if there was a bait and switch - the company pretended that their new stuff would also be free forever. Without intimate kniwledge, I'd venture that Hashicorp never said anything of the kind and they're just trying to make a buck like the rest of us.
The more this happens, the less people will hold the naive view that for-product entities will by default keep providing stuff for free forever. Capitalism baby.
There is a bait and switch, just not the one you proposed. If Terraform had started off under the BSL, it would have significantly less adoption.
As is, people adopted it under evaluation of the old terms, and are now being told the terms are changing going forward.
Since the previous code is still available, this will likely hurt newer, smaller players more than larger established players - if you are offering a large commercial offering on terraform today, you will likely justify maintaining a vendor fork going forward, or contributing to a genuine new fork project like OpenTF.
> The more this happens, the less people will hold the naive view that for-product entities will by default keep providing stuff for free forever. Capitalism baby.
Historically the successful companies had a clear view of what was free and what was charged - e.g. Redhat binary and source distributions were free, but enterprise distributions, commercial support, professional certifications as well as custom software/professional services were all revenue channels.
The rise of more asymmetric licensing terms (e.g. sole corporate copyright with publication under AGPLv3) has been an ongoing change as companies have wanted the freedom to change where they get their money over time, and defend from other members in the community potentially competing against them.
What these companies are doing is basically abandoning the open source code they developed with the support of a huge community. They're developing new software, using OSS contributions, giving a middle finger to the OSS community.
If you don't care, fine. But to me this is a considerable deal.
These are typically very unbalanced relationships between the project "owner" and any contributors - the "owner" may require CLAs and copyright assignment, and reserve the sole right to relicense the code under any license they see fit - but for these sorts of more restrictive relicensing exercises and for an exclusive rights to sell under non-open/copyleft "commercially friendly" licensing.
The anger and frustration usually come from thinking that even though the relationship was unbalanced, there was an understanding and social contract where both a community member and the commercial enterprise got value. The relicensing is unbalanced - it removes value from the community member without providing any new benefit. Sure, they can quit the community, but that also removes the sources of their value.
In the most extreme cases, there have been successful attempts to create entirely new communities (strangely these are predominantly around Oracle-owned projects like MySQL, Hudson, OpenOffice). There is interest in creating a community Redhat-like distribution in the face of RHEL changes, and the HashiCorp change has prompted some to consider new efforts like OpenTF.
To your question, BSL provides additional legal ammo and changes some contributors to competitors, so it is indeed quite different than if the company going out of business.
you simply should not be able to make money of it without giving back to the original source owners.
It makes me wonder how many FOS projects might still be in full swing if we actually gave some of the value back we generated too
[edit] And yes, it's no longer open source. BUSL is not an open-source license.
> For end users who are using HashiCorp’s current open source products and new releases using the BSL license for their internal or personal usage, there is no change.
Source: https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#implications-of-change...
> We have referred to versions of our products as either open source (OSS), Enterprise, or Cloud. Going forward, we will refer to the open, freely available versions as “community”. The BSL license is open, free, and source-available. However, it does not meet the definition of open source as defined by OSI, and that is why we will refer to the products as the "community" edition rather than the "open source" edition as we did previously. There are many references to open source on our websites and we are actively working to clarify these language changes in the coming weeks
Source: https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#details-on-nomenclatur...
What really is changing in the way you or even developers of provisioners handle the software?
It's not about the source code. It's about the freedom.
Do not get me wrong, i would prefer that everything stays at is, but i do also understand the anger with the fact that other people are simply integrating your hard work and are not returning on it.
With the business license you can also still compete, you just have to pay for it. THIS is what i want hashi to be more open about but i also find it hard to not decide that on a case by case basis.
Finally the ultimate truth is that we are way overdo for a completely new tooling in the space and you are also simply free to not use it.
This way, all external contributors own a small part of the copyright to the project. This makes changing the license almost impossible, as it would require either seeking permission from all those contributors or removing all of the code that they wrote.
Whether a company uses a DCO or CLA should be the litmus test of how they really feel about open source. I'd strongly reconsider making your business dependent on any products from the latter.
People don't need to sign a DCO, or any other document, for that to be the case.
I might be mistaken, but I believe this would only apply to copyleft licenses? Permissive licenses allow redistributing under a different license, as long as the attribution and original copyright disclaimer are retained.
For my part, I have thousands of lines of code in Terraform for which I have never signed a CLA or copyright assignment. Nothing stops MPLv2-licensed files being used in a commercial source tree, provided the terms are compiled with.
If that is true, Hashicorp can't change the license on any of the files that contain such code from MPL to BSL, as far as I understand. IANAL, but from what I understand of the license, it doesn't prevent them from distributing a binary with the BSL, but they would need to continue distributing any files with such contributions under the MPL along with any modifications to those files. And keeping track of which files would have that limitation sounds like a nightmare.
[0]: https://opentf.org
Disclaimer: Work at Spacelift
Companies will switch to the open alternative, just like they did with Pekko for Akka. SaaS providers will offer two versions - the Terraform one and the open one - they won't really have a choice.
Interested if this actually picks up steam.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/fork-in-the...
Is this generally considered a truism? Has about zero influence on me, or with director level decision makers at companies I've worked with.
For myself, I only contribute to FOSS just because it is FOSS. If I know it won't be FOSS in the future, I wouldn't contribute to it.
I'm not interested in spending my time working for free for some company if I think they'll end up saying "Hey, actually, this thing you've contributed to, we've decided not everyone should equally be able to run this, so it won't be FOSS anymore, but thanks for the help".
> or with director level decision makers at companies I've worked with
That makes sense. I don't think there is a ton of "director level decision makers" people who are actually involved in writing FOSS on a day to day basis, and also aren't the ones carrying the ecosystem on their back.
The OSS Community is full of projects that are both immensely popular and yet maintained by individuals or very small numbers of contributors.
Thats nice but realistically paid labor gets more done than free labor.
A lot of FOSS dies through neglect that wouldnt happen if someone was paid to work on it.
For which a business model is required.
Why is that "realistic" while FOSS maintainers working on software for the love of FOSS isn't realistic?
Not too long ago, the only ones working on FOSS were unpaid developers, at all.
It isn't just Hashicorp that could relicense all of their products from now forward - you could too, for your own personal editions.
So, mostly no need to add the F to OSS when talking about this particular danger. Although moving to later GPLs has definitely upset people in the past, moving to proprietary (or ideosyncratic) licensing is different. The disputes about moving to later GPLs are about what code people will be forced to share in order to continue using the software in the way they're accustomed to, not about making competition a license violation.
The fact that hasicorp changed their license has precisely zero impact on me using OpenSSL in my next project.
I think the key problem word is "community". 99.999% of OSS users are not in any concept of "community". They just run software. Firefox users aren't a "community" - they are just people browsing the Web.
So no, companies can change to BSL licenses all day and you can count all the people in the world who care in one HN thread.
I'm at the point where I will not contribute to projects with copyright assignment, especially those under more restrictive licenses like GPLv3 or AGPLv3.
It is a sign of a person or organization which has not figured out how they want to make their money, and wants to reserve the ability to take someone else's good idea.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't _use_ such software, but I look at it more as a piece of software where the installer is instead potentially leveraging CMake or autotools. There's rarely value in trying to participate in such a "community", which also tends to push further in the project being more of "published source" rather than a collaboratively driven effort.
Of course, a piece of free software means that I suddenly could lose future support, and software consuming free services means I could lose current support rapidly and even be potentially strong-armed into commercial licensing as a result.
https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq
This all should be incorporated into the BSL, as the current terms are clearly vague enough that they require a separate (not legally binding) FAQ (as it can be changed at any point...)
"Our goal with the BSL license was to make it short and simple. This means the FAQs play an important role in providing interpretive guidance to our users. We view the guidance in these FAQs as binding, so users of our software should feel assured in relying on them as our official positions now and in the future."
https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-updates-licensing-f...
When a company gives you a license that has terms written in it, that license is binding... on them as well as you. When a company gives you a document that refers to an FAQ that they can change on the fly to meet their needs, and make changes to it, that is a signal that they do not view the license's terms as binding on them. Only on you (the user / developer working on an integrated or derivative work.)
The license that grants you permission to use the software as long as you remain on the right side of this line, which we can move as we deign it necessary to move the line is not much of a license grant. I just heard it called "bullshit license" and I think that's the best explanation for what BSL actually stands for now.
I support Hashicorp's right to make money from their business, but I think these lawyers are in over their head. It doesn't make much sense to me. We'll have to see who gets a license grant from Hashi and how much they're going to pay for it.
https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#future-competitive-pro...
If in the future HashiCorp creates an offering then they will exempt me from action under the BSL according to this section. What is the likelihood of this changing later on? What is my recourse if it does? All of these questions, you can ask yourself (and your lawyers, again and again each time) now of any open source project that makes contributors sign a CLA. Since there was nothing stopping HashiCorp from doing this, what will stop others?
This is a terrible thing for Open Source IMO. Competition is good, but I understand HashiCorp have some competitors that are leveraging their good will against them and costing them deals. I hope that Hashi don't use this new license to squash their competitors and stamp out Open Source. But I won't take that as foregone conclusion, it's up to HashiCorp how they pursue these changes and up to the rest of us how to react when they do. I've got my fingers crossed for good.
Spacelift co-founder here. I keep seeing this argument, and I'm puzzled. What good will are we talking about, and how are we leveraging it against anyone? Is building a good commercial product that folks love on top of an open source ecosystem somehow unethical? And if so - why? I used every opportunity to try and help Hashi build something better on top of core TF, both personally (applied for a job on their TFE team back in 2018, talked about many ideas that then went into Spacelift instead) and as a company (we tried VERY hard to partner). All to no avail.
On the other hand, for 9 years non-Hashi folks (including ourselves here at Spacelift) spent countless hours, for the first years contributing to Terraform core, and more recently when PRs were no longer accepted they were still busy building providers, modules, tooling, courses, tutorials, cheatsheets, they've been running local meetups, all powered by the open source ethos and the common good.
Not really sure who is leveraging whose good will here.
We for one have no impact or intention to stop using Hashi products
If this is somehow permissible under the original license, it points to needing licenses that offer more consistency and protection. If I contribute to your project, I want to make sure that you can’t close the door on the codebase whenever you feel that you’ve harvested enough value from me, value that you’re now going to go monetize with others.
Every project, company, contributor, and community get to decide this for themselves. There are no easy or correct answers
On the monetization question - do you need to give others the opportunity to give money back? If so, who should assess the size and "adequacy" of these contributions? If you don't provide the opportunity for others to sponsor the project, does it change your rights and obligations?
These are not easy questions, and now our entire industry is trying to work out the answers. OP's is one voice in this discussion, and an important one given GitLab's prominence and the fact that they took a different path, which seems to be working well for them.
It's also a way more complex problem for software like Terraform that explicitly depends on the work of others for its core functionality than for something that works perfectly fine standalone, like Hashi's Vault, or indeed GitLab itself.
They sell licenses to major (even government) institutions and Hashi OSS might be used as part of the solution, but Hashi aren't getting a cut of the deal. Let's say. I think those big companies want to have Terraform support with a capital T, and it would diminish their marks substantially to switch streams now and edge out Hashi, the smaller player (who is actually doing all of the work), by supporting OpenTF – separating them from ongoing development efforts of HashiCorp who undoubtedly are expending some significant labor to make and maintain Terraform itself.
But I don't think it's right for Open Source companies to pull the rug on other companies that have built successful products on them. I think the best outcome possible for Spacelift and companies like it now is the OpenTF route (assuming you can't get a suitably proper BUSL license grant from HashiCorp, which it seems like you might if you get them to declare you "not a competitor" even once, according to the FAQ as it reads today. IANAL.)
I think you're using the MPL software as the license was designed, and your company should be able to deliver Terraform with additional value provided through the interface and the scaffolding (eg. better Terraform Cloud) that you built around it, and charge money for it. But of course I'm not the lawyer. I am very glad to meet you here though!
IANAL as well, but this sounds like a HUGE trap. Will that protect you from their next licensing change and its restrictions?
Is such a declaration transferrable? Would it limit Spacelift's exit strategies because they would be unable to ship their product if acquired?
If there is a community where the new licensing terms no longer meet people's needs, then something like OpenTF is absolutely the right way to go. Anything else, and your company is operating by the grace of Hashi.
Well unless TF competitors were prepared to go off and build their own (OpenTF) it's as you say anyway, Terraform doesn't just spring into existence without Hashi building it first. If you are building on it, then you have it to build upon because they built it first. License changes notwithstanding, if the ongoing efforts of HashiCorp today are worth anything to you, then it's to your advantage to go on supporting TF with a capital T and disregard the fork. But if you think they will try to extract more than their contribution is worth from you, then the choice is clear...ish. How much will it cost you to form and maintain the fork?
It's a tough calculation. Will you derive more benefit from the partnership with Hashi (assuming they're amenable to forming one) or will you derive more benefit from the ownership associated with building your own OpenTF? How much will it cost? Must be all companies with a Terraform arm are doing this calculus right now, trying to figure out if there is a "support both" option they can live with, or otherwise if they're going to have to pick one, how to not pick the loser.
I understand that for some companies the calculus may be obvious and the choices clear. If your entire business depends on Terraform, then accepting all the terms might as well be tantamount to accepting a full buyout without any price tag. It's a pretty big no-brainer of a "no deal!" but on the other hand if you are VMWare or RedHat and you need for your contracts to support Terraform with a capital T...
I think it's those companies who can't just say "we support the fork" and move on with business as usual, without taking a big hit to the credibility of their support promises. Will they actually participate in a fork, if they say they support a fork? (Will you welcome them with open arms, or skepticism? What if it turns out that their under-participation in the Terraform ecosystem of yesteryore is the actual reason we are in this position now? Again, speculating...)
What does that signal about their commitment to the tech if they do follow the fork, and what does it mean for their big clients who might have already cut some deals with Hashicorp on their own... and can one even support both without putting oneself in a precarious legal position?
Companies change their Toss and other legal docs all the time, this is just another one, though not typical. Their FAQ now has legal obligations for both parties, unlike how we see most FAQs
You change the license once, everyone gets to read it, reflect on it, speak to their lawyers if they're not sure about it, and move on. Using the mutable FAQ in lieu of an immutable license is just a sign that the interpretation is purely based on the vendor's (mutable) business goals, and you should be very careful building on any particular "binding" version.
This is a balanced article and I definitely agree about being clear on what constitutes competition. A few questions:
1. Does Gitlab see much competition from hyperscale providers like AWS?
2. Given that Gitlab has a thicker proprietary crust and a relatively smaller open source core (compared to hashi), is Gitlab more insulated from these types of issues?
I don't see what locking corporations into future open releasing does to solve the general problem.
The problem is fueling and operating maintenance and development for as long as those costs remain worthwhile. There are no perpetual motion machines. We have multiple data points from companies suggesting the rules of the game being played today create an inflection point away from universal permissive licensing. Restricting an organization's freedom of operation might maximize the time it holds out in forlorn hope on a pure, doomed model. It might also grind it to a halt when it could have kept going by compromise.
A project steward going bust can send a clear signal to former free riders that they need to step up and organize or switch off. But in the meantime, what's to stop some other firm, without charter restrictions, stepping in to try the model the restricted firm wasn't allowed to? What's to stop the engineers at the restricted firm jumping ship?
On the level of implementation, I wonder at the need for public benefit corporation structure, with all its vagueness, expenses, and complications. Are the feel-goods really worth the complication?
You can put corporate-powers limitations in a "regular" corporation charter. That's a key part of how we turn C-corps into tax-exempt charities and business leagues. The restrictions we put in, say, 501(c)(3) charters also read vague, but they're statutory language we've been fighting about and refining by law over time. Conversely, putting eight novel, vaguely worded restrictions into a corporate charter, with or without line-by-line statements of intent, is putting a whole lot of fluff in the very beating heart of a governance structure. Who settles interpretation fights there, a judge in a shareholder derivative suit? I think the hullabaloo of the OpenAI Charter might be instructive.
Ouch. Looking at Nomad has been on my ToDo list for ages.
What's the better alterative?
The HN trope is "you don't need k8s," but k8s manifests have a lot of mindshare behind them. I'd rather use a managed k8s versus manage my own Nomad pool. Sure, managed k8s is complex for cloud providers, but I can mostly offload that complexity provided I'm not full microservices inside the cluster.
I also appreciate that the article on staying open source and maintaining trust is written by a VC firm. That's really putting your money where your mouth is.
eg after they're acquired, IPO'd, or dissolve?
Asking because things seem to still be at an early stage with yourselves (thus far), so not remembering anything that's reached the end of the VC pipeline yet.
We agree to license the Contribution only under the terms of the license or licences which We are using on the Submission Date for the Work in which the Contribution is included or the following additional licenses ...
This would let the company re-license to selected other open source licenses for compatibility/strategy, etc, but not allow BSL, etc
The point of open source is to allow people (giant corporations) to take the code and do whatever they want with it.
Depending on the license, a party without copyright may be able to create a derived work that incorporates the original. The derived work may have a different license as long as the incorporation satisfies the original license. This is what people normally think of as using open source licensed code, and it does not include re-licensing code.
I shared a similar sentiment here [0]. The future of open source companies is taking a serious posture for it and clarifying as best as possible to all stakeholders involved what this stance is. Love this piece.
TL;DR: In September 2022, Lightbend changed Akka's license from Apache 2.0 to BSL 1.1
Pekko is playing catchup right now. Also, they're a bit of a small crowd. (As in .. under lightbend Akka has developed a crowd.. but Pekko has to struggle to form now)
Essentially, because the software is so close to the company it's hard to be certain that the project is independent, sure you can fork it but look at what it did to openelastic. Not much.
Instead if it's maintained by a foundation then it's much harder for a company to assert full control.
It doesn't solve freeloaders but it's I think a big reason for freeloaders existing.
And my argument is basically, that companies will not be incentivized to contribute back to the project if it's effectively transparent but proprietary in practice.
Their own words https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/ad634f60a5acbaad...
> open-source _community_
Listen to the Hashi CEO talk about community @18m
As for GitLab, it isn't changing to BSL, so they can keep using it.
Think of a few what?
You listed a bunch of links to GitLab CE, which is not their enterprise offering, does not compete with their enterprise offering, and has an order of magnitude less functionality and no support. Again, their enterprise offering is already under a proprietary license.
GitLab openly supports anyone deploying and managing GitLab CE: https://hub.docker.com/r/gitlab/gitlab-ce
Not sure what you're alluding to?
But I don't think either not-fully-free-but-related-to-open-source model is as disappointing as the rug-pull of a license change itself.
Aside: I think BuSL can be a great license for software that's not part of any customer/user's way of earning a living. Id Software basically used to informally use a similar scheme for all their game engines (and maybe still do?), where the engines get released as F/OSS some number of years after the game comes out, and that has ended up enabling the development of lots of good open-source games and game engines.
It can basically undo the damage caused by our insanely long default copyright terms. Not the same thing as providing open-source code up front, but still a very pro-social thing to do.
1) The license allows bundling of licensed code with code under alternate licenses. This kind of is the point of many business friendly licenses such as the widely used Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses. I don't see this as a bad thing.
2) Alternatively, the company simply owns the copyright to the entire code base and insists on copy right transfers for any outside contributions. Elastic did this. And they were using Apache 2.0 as their license as well.
The best way to insure against companies re-licensing and controlling a code base is by diversifying the community of contributors. Most long lived open source projects have so many contributors across the industry that anyone taking the source code and closing it would just amount to a weird isolated fork that probably won't get much traction. Perfectly legal under some licenses. If you want a BSL licensed version of Apache httpd. You can just take the source code and start layering your BSL licensed patches on top. But there's very little point in doing that as everybody else will just keep on adding to the upstream OSS code base.
Other licenses are designed to prevent this entirely. Which is where copyright transfers become relevant. Any company using AGPL v3 and insisting on copyright transfers is basically just trying to coerce people to buy their proprietary licensed version instead. It's a common strategy among some OSS companies. I don't think it works that well for many companies. Mostly you just throw away the baby with the bathwater. You alienate a lot of potential users as well as contributors.
I use a few simple rules:
- I avoid anything licensed under the AGPLv3. Just not worth the legal headaches. Luckily, this is easy because there isn't a whole lot of software under that license that I particularly care about. If I need a lawyer to figure out if my intended use of a given bit of software is allowed, morally justified, etc., I'm not interested. The attitude with a lot of users of this license seems to be leaning towards communism in the sense that all form of value creation is frowned upon and seen as profiteering. So, I respect that attitude by just ignoring anything under that license for personal or company use. No exceptions.
- I don't contribute source code if there's a copyright transfer involved or if the software is not under a proper open source license. If you want to own your software that's fine, but that means you are responsible for fixing it as well. So, anything BSL or similarly licensed is not going to get patches from me. I might file a bug but I won't lift a finger to close it. A hard condition for me coding anything is either financial compensation or a proper OSS license.
- I avoid using non open sourced software as much as I can. That future proofs what I do. I tend to gravitate to things with active communities. This put me a bit in a dilemma with Elasticsearch when they went closed their source and fractured their community (opensearch is the OSS fork). I still deal with Elasticsearch professionally. But I'm gradually shifting my attention to Opensearch. And my observation is that they fractured their customer base and that new users are defaulting to Opensearch. Hashicorp is likely to end up facing a similar situation.
- For my own oss projects, I use the MIT license. Maximizes my user's flexibility to do whatever they need to do without limiting mine. Including creating valuable closed source products. That's a feature, not a bug. Go for it. I want you to create value and benefit from my software. More power to you. That's part of the OSS contract. Contributing back is appreciated but not required.
Companies that value having active developer communities are mutually exclusive with overly restrictive licenses. What's nice about things like Linux is that the community is lots of companies taht build commercial and proprietary products on top of it. And they end up contributing back. It's this commercial success of Linux that drives its success and keeps its community healthy and diverse. GPLv2 was a happy accident that it contained enough loopholes for this to work.
The only open source license that preserves your right to repair (of both the contributor and the user) is the variants of the GNU Public License (GPL). Every other open source project with more permissive license can one day be "close-sourced". The GPL requires that source is always available with the distribution. That is why I feel contributing to any non-GPL project is an unproductive venture as your own source code could one day be denied to you (which I find ridiculous due to the free labour involved).
Linux is a very good example of this - many corporates in the US and China have been forced to share the Linux source code they customised for their device due to the GPL. This has helped developers and new features and / or users maintain the software for their devices longer (even after the product reached end-of-life - see https://thenewstack.io/the-open-source-lesson-of-the-linksys... for a good example of this).
The only reason the corporates aggressively advocate for non-GPL permissive opensource license is because that is the only way they can freely convert it to "close-sourced" versions, ensuring that you have to depend solely on them for future development. To me, that trumps the real benefits of the open source philosophy.
…with that being said, I will say that I welcome companies like Pulumi to the IaC landscape. IaC makes a lot of sense conceptually, but unlike a lot of HN (from my perspective), I strongly dislike terraform and HCL and most Hashicorp products. There’s also enough of an impedance mismatch between TF and cloud providers that I’d be poised to just use cloud formation or ARM or something native over tf, which was never cloud agnostic anyway like their marketing claims.
It's open - somebody else can pick up where they left off, if they really care (like OpenSearch did for Elasticsearch).
I do appreciate it, in the sense that I am saddened they are throwing away that value and their good-will.
There are almost certainly enough commercial interests in terraform to join together on a community fork. The nature of terraform providers in particular means that the community fork would almost certainly then become a primary target for providers.
I suspect nowadays many people using the project don't even realize that the Jenkins CI system was actually a fork of another popular system at the time named Hudson. It was forked due to claims being made by Oracle legal, and even after they straightened things out and made Hudson an open project (with assignments to Eclipse foundation) the damage was done and Hudson died off.
I'm doing what I can to nip that typo in the bud: it's b*U*sl https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html
Yeah, yeah, context matters, Hashicorp did not switch to Boost Software License, but it would be so much better to be accurate than "you know what I meant"
People bought into the product based on various factors, one of which may have been the license. They put hundreds or even thousands of hours into integrating that product into their environment. Then someone pulls the rug out from under them.
That Hashicorp were accepting community contributions from people who will never see a monetary return on that investment —- while Hashicorp makes money on their work —- adds insult to injury.
Businesses who use that kind of tactic are not high on my list of people to give my money to.
It creates a moat around monetising the tool, not using it. I certainly see the argument around free loaders.
And mint it did, billions, in the IPO. And now, abandoning its ideals for the sake of money, I feel a lot less optimistic about open source going forward.
Also makes me question OSS promise when w/e I build will be captured by CloudProvider or cheaper alternative.
Why I would build anything OSS if my time will never pay off ?
Having followed Mitchell Hashimoto’s work on Vagrant, I felt like he and Armon were truly value driven and not purely money oriented.
But it’s true, dollars corrupt and billions of dollars corrupt absolutely.
[0] https://ir.hashicorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...
And Hashicorp’s founders sacrificed ideals for the sake of billions.
Money is just necessary. It doesn't matter if other things are more important on some theoretical hierarchy. If you need a necessary thing then that's all that matters.