From the blog post:
[…] today we are announcing that HashiCorp is changing its source code license from Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL, also known as BUSL) v1.1 on all future releases of HashiCorp products. HashiCorp APIs, SDKs, and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0.
BSL 1.1 is a source-available license that allows copying, modification, redistribution, non-commercial use, and commercial use under specific conditions.
I understand their reasoning, but am still left disappointed.
That’s where I’m at too. Philosophically its a bummer. For the majority of users of their codebase however, this presents zero changes and the only entity I known of who would be impacted by this change going forward is AWS
So I was trying to figure out what are they getting defensive against. It was clear in redhat’s case, but I only really found pulumi as some sort of alternative to terraform and I’m not even sure it relies on it. What is the AWS product that’s competing here?
Pulumi relies on Terraform providers, it can actually “plug in” any Terraform provider. This won’t be much of a problem though, as Hashicorp has pushed the work of developing and maintaining providers to its “partners”. Even providers under the Hashicorp umbrella like AWS is not actively developed by hashicorp personell so there is really no play here, as is reflected by them not touching the license in those repositories.
I honestly don’t.
AWS and other cloud providers have already proven, eg. with Mongo and Elastic, that they are perfectly happy to either provide an API compatible offering or just fork the product and then offer the service at a lower price point, which proves again that if the only thing you have to compete is price, you don’t have a competitive product.
What does this mean?🤔
Given I was recently involved in minimising the impact of Lightbend’s similar move earlier this year, AFAIU it means their products will be conditionally open source. They’ll be free to use for non-commercial use but you’d need to pay for anything else.
There is no such thing as “conditionally open source.” The license terms you describe are just “not open source.”
If they actually gave a shit about commercial entities contributing back, they should’ve gone AGPL3. This is just a money grab and yet another example of how permissive licensing isn’t good enough and everything should be copyleft.
It basically means you can view the code, which is the literal by-the-word definition of open source. It’s not the common understanding of open source, which would be free-to-use (with some minor restrictions like attribution or publishing derivatives under the same license).
Its still open source. You can still view the source code. That’s what open source is. The change here is the restriction on providing Terraform as a service in the form of a Terraform Cloud competitor. This seems to be a very direct response to Amazon introducing a service for hosting terraform modules, storing terraform state, and applying changes.
I don’t love this, but they’re also not restricting anyone’s comercial ability to develop products using terraform like a banking app, a link aggregator, or a e-commerce platform. All you’re restricted on is providing an IaC service where you directly profit from running someone else’s terraform for them. This is the same license the MariaDB creators came up with when they felt burned by Oracle but did want people to be able to build closed source products using their database without profiting from providing their db as a service (this is why many self hosted projects use Maria instead of MySQL) which is why AWS can’t offer maria RDS instances.
AGPL wouldn’t help them keep developing terraform the way BSL would because their business problem isn’t that no one is contributing back to the code, their problem is a $1T market disruptor just turned their Sauron eye towards Hashicorp’s $5B shire and offered their own shire for less money behind the black gates. All after for many years directly benefitting from Hashicorp’s existence and giving them white glove treatment as a result. And yes I’m aware that in this analogy Hashicorp is probably one of the Nazghul being corrupted.
Like I said. I don’t love this license change. But like I said. Hashicorp doesn’t have a code contributions to Terraform problem. They have a funding their business and development problem
You’re conflating FOSS and open source. This is open source just not FOSS anymore
There’s no need to AFAIU when their FAQ explains all the detail, which is that commercial production use is fine as long as you’re not using it to build a competitor product to Hashicorp.
was about to include it in my stack, guess i wont be now.
This is the 2nd of such moves this year to my knowledge; first there was #Lightbend and #Akka and now this. What a year for #FOSS 😕
I know for a fact that so many organisations use #hashicorp products for commercial purposes w/o ever contributing back. And I understand how this may feel for hashicorp in these harsh economic times. Though this still is, IMHO, a cheap move: they used an OSS license for a very long time which resulted in a massive user base and a “soft” vendor lock-in, and now they decided to milk that user base.
Looking forwards to solid community-driven forks of their products 💪
