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Comment by galenmarchetti | Hacker News Reader

True...it's just difficult to draft a license that says something along the lines of "If you're Big Tech, we have the right to go after you, if you're small startup, you're safe".

I think there's a swath of Terraform users (likely minority) who find themselves in a legal gray area, or a legal black-and-white area, where they're directly at risk. Even if Hashicorp never intended to target small startups with this, the wording of the license unfortunately applies and is enough to make anyone nervous.

I think MongoDB had a similar issue when they went source-available, they seemed to intend to only protect themselves from big tech but unfortunately a lot of smaller players got spooked. I think (?) it's fine now though

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I don't know if it'd really be hard (you could list them, or have various limits on users or total revenue among all related companies). You could broadly include all subsidiaries, contractors working for Amazon, companies effectively under their control, etc. (Ultimately it'll be interpreted by a judge, not an algorithm, that probably makes it harder to get around.) There is nothing illegal about offering a license to everyone except Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

But none of those licenses would be open source licenses. That's the problem with doing it — you can't do that in an open source license.

The no discrimination clauses are a requirement of the open source definition, not the law. (The law of course does have some non-discrimination requirements, not sure how many of those apply to copyright licenses. But none of the normal ones would prohibit "everyone but Amazon may use this".)

> True...it's just difficult to draft a license that says something along the lines of "If you're Big Tech, we have the right to go after you, if you're small startup, you're safe".

Take a look at the license of LLAMA2 by FB. It has a clause just like this. I.e. limit by number of users.

wow, didn't know about this. very cool + would be interesting to see this in more places. Just checked it out. for those lazy:

"If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee's affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights."

yea, that makes all the difference. If it was almost all Hashicorp, the open source was a marketing gimmick and I don't blame them for not risking the entire business on it. If there was heavy involvement from external contributors, then removing open source is more of a rug pull.

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