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Comment by jen20 | Hacker News Reader

They did not relicense.

All HashiCorp have done is made their own future contributions subject to BSL, not relicensed any previous contribution, nor do they have the ability to do that without copyright assignment of each and every contribution, which they do not have (specifically I have never signed a copyright assignment, and nor has at least one other of the top ten contributors of all time).

Nothing about MPLv2 prevents inclusion in a commercial product provided the attribution and file-based copyleft provisions are followed.

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> All HashiCorp have done is made their own future contributions subject to BSL, not relicensed any previous contribution,

There's are only 2 .go files left in the hashicorp/terraform repo on GitHub which still have MPL-2.0 in their license headers, so either there are virtually no such contributions left in Terraform or they have in fact attempted to relicense code.

This looks like relicensing to me: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/53c34ff49cfbc1...

Btw, no .go file that you still show up in `git blame` for has an MPL notice header.

The LibreOffice project faced a similar dilemma and have carefully kept the old licenses in their files, and new license in new code in new files.

what license did they change to/from?

I will follow up on that, it was not the case even quite recently. If they really have rewritten all code, then great - I have no problem with this!

Replacing code whose license you don't want is definitely a fair-and-square way to manage a project and change the overall terms under which you can distribute it. (As it happens, that tactic is often essential to efforts to open-source formerly proprietary projects, too.)

*Provided that the replacement is not simply a rewritten version of the same code that achieves the same result through overwhelmingly similar methodology.

The function of code is explicitly not protected by copyright and the breadth of this exemption was clarified and expanded by Google vs Oracle.

Is that something you can do? I wouldn't have thought there previous license would be compatible with the BSL, and so distributing the software under the BSL wouldn't be possible?

It's standard for BSD and MIT style licenses and similar to just require the copyright notice be retained in e.g. a LICENSE file or equivalent.

A bunch of commercial software right now (cough I'm writing this on MacOS) uses BSD-licensed foundations.

MPLv2 is file-based copyleft, and there are no restrictions on including it in a commercial work provided that changes to MPLv2-licensed files are accessible per the terms.

Indeed it’s something of a spiritual successor to CDDL which was designed precisely for that purpose (although reliable sources also say it was designed to be GPL-incompatible, so that is literally a he-said/she-said case).

The CDDL is an MPLv1 derivative, so similarities should be unsurprising

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