Tbh I don't really understand what the implications of #hashicorp 's licence changes actually are. What does it mean dor tools like terragrunt and atlantis, which make use of #terraform? Could someone #eli5? 😅
Looks like #TMobile also published their own. Theirs is currently based on #Hashicorp Vault, so maybe they'll be the one to fork it to maintain their current project? Unfortunately, that repo hasn't been updated in over a year!
It seems they're not the only ones who offload the heavy lifting to #Hashicorp Vault. Looks like a bunch of #opensource projects that extended Vault are going to get screwed by this change.
Can it be, a promising truly #opensource#Hashicorp#Vault alternative? You can pay for hosting or on-prem support, but the stack appears to be fully FOSS and includes a webUI! #envkey
BUSL 1.2 - You can run, modify, and redistribute this software freely until we arbitrarily decide that you can't. We further assert the right to retroactively find you in violation, arbitrarily and entirely at our own discretion. You further agree to not hold us liable for claiming that this software is "open source" on our website, marketing materials, and sales calls. (C) 2024 #Hashicorp, probably.
So, I wanna explain why #Hashi's "commercial use" restriction means a proprietary license.
Theoretically, if you were using their project to work on an OSS project that you gave away for free, it wouldn't apply to you, right?
Well, no.
Take, for example, the Kubernetes Project. Kubernetes is a free, open source project, owned by a nonprofit. We also use Terraform to support our infra in a couple places.
@fuzzychef I think the key part is "an offering competitive with #HashiCorp products or services" and is addressed in point 6 of the FAQ:
"6. Who is impacted by this change?
Organizations providing competitive offerings to HashiCorp will no longer be permitted to use the community edition products free of charge under our BSL license."
If someone is packaging #Hashicorp software and not aware of the license change, and your company uses that downstream software that now pulls in the BUSL code, and your company competes with Hashicorp in some conceivable way (deploys VMs, stores passwords, builds images), is your company now in violation and liable even if the vendor you got it from still has a (now-incompatible) MPL license in their repo? The audits of this are not going to be fun.
Anyone else remember how #MariaDB company adopting the "Business Source License" for MaxScale made MaxScale and the company super-profitable? No one? Oh yeah, that's because it didn't. #Hashicorp#BUSL#opensource
My point is not to convince anyone to stop using #MariaDB - definitely do - it's absolutely awesome and #opensource. It happens to be awesome because it is owned by a Foundation that guarded it against the Company doing exactly what #Hashicorp just did. I also can't think of a reason why #Hashicorp won't enjoy similar outcomes to MariaDB Company. Hopefully, the common tools (Terraform, Vault) will get forked and maintained by a Foundation. The company is screwed. It's only a matter of time.
@viktor If #Hashicorp follows the playbook of #Elastic and others, I assume they'll do something hostile soon in the name of "innovation" whereby the next release or so will have abrupt major breaking changes that make current versions of the clients and providers instantly useless, causing tons of disruptions to end-users, in an attempt to make a fork of yesterday's code harder to pull off.
Any insights how #fedora and #debian will handle the license change in #vagrant? I don't hope they would include BSL code in the distro, so… freeze the version of vagrant before the license change? Any prominent OSS fork already? #opensource#osi#license#freesoftware
@fwilhe@adamw Yup. There's a reason you won't find #MongoDB, etc. in the #Fedora repos. Interestingly, #Hashicorp name dropped #MariaDB but MariaDB itself isn't BUSL licensed. The MariaDB company (not the Foundation) created the BUSL during one of its misadventures but it wasn't applied to the flagship "product" like Hashicorp has done, but only for its MaxScale cloud service, which hasn't turned out to be very profitable..
@fwilhe@adamw The #MariaDB database is still very much #opensource and likely available in your favorite distribution. The #Hashicorp blog post was misleading, IMO, by not making the very important distinction between the flagship database license and a very specific proprietary orchestrator for the database made by the MariaDB company. The MariaDB Foundation governs the database and had nothing to do with BUSL.
Unimpressed by #HashiCorp
We use #terraform in our service deployments and now the teams that do that will be having to decide what to do. All actions are going to cost.
The danger Hashicorp have to fear is if another open source fork of their current code gains traction. I can see motivation there
@vwbusguy I can see a lot of people worrying "All production uses are allowed other than hosting or embedding the software in an offering competitive with HashiCorp products or services.", as everyone is offering cloud-hosted services-so it comes down to "what is the #hashicorp product portfolio " -and what if they change?
Its always going to be knee-jerk reaction instead of understanding whats going on. #hashicorp / #terraform license changes is not going to affect you, unless you were creating a competing product to Terraforms products, by using their OSS.
Normal usage is not affected. And even so, maybe #devops is maturing out of TF ;)
My guess is that is exactly what they are seeing in numbers.
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 💪
HashiCorp changes license from Mozilla Public License 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1 on their products (www.hashicorp.com)