There was no rugpull. The product is MIT licensed up until the commit that introduced the BUSL license.
The license change is the very definition of "rugpull":
Use permissive license, build up a community of open source users and people who use your product because of its open code base.
Once it stops suiting your business desires, revoke that permissive license, and switch to one that excludes a (significant) portion of your code's user base.
But Hashicorp's business hasn't turned a profit to date. And they rarely merge external pull requests.
If the company maintained the previous ZIRP-era permissive license status quo and then eventually went bankrupt, wouldn't that be a worse outcome for everyone?
When they started out, they had enormous traction in the community because they were open source. People actively contributed to what they thought was an open ecosystem in a collaborative spirit. Without that, their products would just be another expensive, marginal proprietary piece of softwarewthat most people ignored.
Now they're trying to profit off that without reciprocating (their competence at being able actually show a profit is irrelevant).
> If the company maintained the previous ZIRP-era permissive license status quo and then eventually went bankrupt, wouldn't that be a worse outcome for everyone?
No. It'd be a worse outcome for Hashicorp's investors, sure, but the rest of us would have the code, the comunity, and a little less poison in the well.
People don't adopt software only because it is open source. It also has to be useful high-quality software. Attributing the entirety of their success to a permissive open source license is nonsensical.
> Now they're trying to profit off that without reciprocating
Their products are still free to use and you can still read the code. They continue to improve the products. In what way are they not reciprocating? And considering this is a publicly-traded for-profit enterprise, why shouldn't they be able to profit off their work?
Unless your business is directly competing with them, how does the license change directly affect you?
> the rest of us would have the code, the comunity, and a little less poison in the well
At the cost of losing the creator and primary contributor of these projects, which tends to be a death blow to the software's long-term viability!
These things are symbiotic. It's a virtue circle. People find it useful, they contribute, other people then find it useful, it grows in popularity, people contribute etc. It's pretty clear that Hashicorp hoped to take advantage of this to build popularity when they open sourced their product code.
If you don't think this is true, why do you think they released it under an OSS license?
> In what way are they not reciprocating?
Reciprocating would mean allowing others to build businesses on software they have also contributed to.
> And considering this is a publicly-traded for-profit enterprise, why shouldn't they be able to profit off their work?
It's not all their own work.
No-one's saying it's not ok to profit from it, it's about screwing over and denying that right to others who built the product to what it is today.
> Unless your business is directly competing with them, how does the license change directly affect you?
The license is badly written, andtherefore risky for any business to use. For example, the word "competing" is not defined. If I build a system to store secrets in MySQL and put an API in front of it, am I competing with vault? What if I sell a managed database service and Oracle buys Hashicorp, am I now competing?
It's badly written on purpose, because Hashicorp don't want anyone (with $$ and a competent legal department) to take their silly license, they want to sell them a contract.
> At the cost of losing the creator and primary contributor of these projects, which tends to be a death blow to the software's long-term viability!
If it's useful high-quality software, history shows us that such projects continue to thrive regardless of the status of the 'creator' (e.g. Jenkins).
I'm not familiar with Hashicorp's motivations for using a permissive license, and I believe this is tangential to the point being discussed (attributing Hashicorps' products success simply to being open source vs being useful software that solved problems in a novel way).
But I do know sometimes software is open-sourced (or at least made source-available) without accepting changes upstream at all, which clearly isn't done for reasons of wanting contributions. Or other times, authors will accept some outside contributions, but aren't outwardly seeking or encouraging them.
Nothing in any FOSS license requires the author to accept changes. Having the source be available is beneficial on its own for reasons of adoption and allowing users to trust the software.
> Reciprocating would mean allowing others to build businesses on software they have also contributed to.
Nothing prevents these companies from doing so via a fork of the last FOSS-licensed version, which is exactly what they've done, and is fine legally.
> It's not all their own work.
They own it. This is clear cut. It's copyrighted and has a CLA for third party contributions.
> it's about screwing over and denying that right to others
What "right" is that exactly, and what makes it a "right"? Legally you can't just make up "rights" based on feelings and assumptions.
Absolutely nothing in these permissive licenses requires future versions of the work to keep the same license.
> If it's useful high-quality software, history shows us that such projects continue to thrive regardless of the status of the 'creator' (e.g. Jenkins)
No, history shows it's quite a mixed bag, for example OpenSolaris/illumos has a minuscule amount of marketshare/mindshare compared to Solaris's heyday.
Also, Hashicorp very clearly created Vault, Terraform, etc and putting creator in quotes is a really gross way to minimize their clear achievement in designing useful and novel software that previously did not exist, and would not have existed if not for their efforts.
I wrote a PR to fix something in Vault, then nothing happened for a while, then I saw that hashicorp is changing their licensing, and soon after that, my fix was merged. My fix sat waiting until they changed their license, and then it was merged before I had time to consider if I wanted to contribute under that license.
(Incidentally, sentry also changed their license soon after I interacted with the project. Maybe it's me ruining the OSS world)
I saw a similar thing happen with another product recently. It made me realise even though the project was touting itself as open source you couldn't even build the open code into a useable product.
So the importance of assigning copyright to a suitable body crystallised for me.
Fixed it for ya.