HashiCorp Adopts Business Source License

• terraform

  500 41,118 9.9 Go

  Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

  

> I doubt they'd gain much adoption if it started with BSL at first place

Adoption is one risk, https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/graphs/contributors is an entirely different risk

• Vault

  160 29,644 10.0 Go

  A tool for secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management

  

Maybe we'll see the whole team at [Axiom](https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/0b12cdcfd17278d7cca2...) riding around in Maseratis.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• Tutanota makes encryption easy

  467 5,736 9.9 TypeScript

  Tuta is an email service with a strong focus on security and privacy that lets you encrypt emails, contacts and calendar entries on all your devices.

  

• infracost

  85 10,266 9.7 Go

  Cloud cost estimates for Terraform in pull requests💰📉 Shift FinOps Left!

  

Inevitable end for every open source company since the free money ended. What bothers me is that wording is vague enough.

> HashiCorp considers a competitive offering to be a product or service provided to users or customers outside of your organization that has significant overlap with the capabilities of HashiCorp’s commercial products or services.

So, consider there is no cost estimate service and you built a thing that got popular (https://github.com/infracost/infracost). Then after 2 years Terraform Cloud catches up. What happens? Are you out of business?

• infisical

  104 11,920 10.0 TypeScript

  ♾ Infisical is the open-source secret management platform: Sync secrets across your team/infrastructure and prevent secret leaks.

  

All this implies is that Hashicorp is no longer an open source company. Many of Hashicorp's actions like this one run completely against the nature of open source software. Another example is `Hashicorp Vault Secrets` - which they just launched as a closed-source SaaS only tool.

I'm obviously very biased, but take a look at Infisical as an open source alternative to Vault: https://github.com/Infisical/infisical (we run under MIT + some enterprise features).

• pulumi-aws

  3 417 9.5 Go

  An Amazon Web Services (AWS) Pulumi resource package, providing multi-language access to AWS

  

Sure, but the providers for some of the biggest platforms are maintained by HashiCorp[1] - like the AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes providers[2], and it appears the Pulumi AWS provider (for example) _does_ use the Terraform AWS provider, even to this day[3].

1. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/registry/providers... - "official" providers are maintained by HashiCorp

2. https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers?tier=official - The filtered list of "official" providers maintained by HashiCorp

3. https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/tree/008c4360bc9fc24303... - Just prove it to myself, I can see the `upstream` git submodule, which embeds pulumi/terraform-provider-aws, which is a fork of hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws, although the repo was not created as a fork in Github, so it is not marked as a "fork" and so I have to compare commit histories to tell that it is a fork.

• gitlab

  448 - -

IANAL but I believe this change applies only to Hashicorp source code and not API compatible endpoints. So, had (and for clarity, they for sure did not) GitLab used terraform source code to implement such a state provider, yes, they'd run afoul and have to fork or relinquish their license of the source

But similar to the GitLab Sentry backend API (e.g. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v15.0.0-ee/lib/a... ) the Terraform state endpoints are also in Rails, just like all the rest of the Internet facing GitLab API: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v15.0.0-ee/lib/a...

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Nomad

  94 14,422 9.9 Go

  Nomad is an easy-to-use, flexible, and performant workload orchestrator that can deploy a mix of microservice, batch, containerized, and non-containerized applications. Nomad is easy to operate and scale and has native Consul and Vault integrations.

  

While I do understand the reasoning in their FAQ on the subject (https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq). I however failed to noticed those intentions in their license text (https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/commit/b3e30b1dfa185d9437...).

Specifically the part in FAQ which says "internal production use is fine", but then license says that "non-production use only" and then "You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products.".

IANAL, but even to me this statement is full loopholes. WHO do we consider 3rd party? WHAT do we consider "hosted or embedded basis"? WHEN do we consider it "competitive with Hashicorps products"?

• rivet

  3 1,821 9.9 Rust

  🔩 Open-source solution to deploy, scale, and operate your multiplayer game (by rivet-gg)

  

We built our OSS company (Apache 2.0) with Nomad at its core. We provide game server orchestration with a handful of services around it, which could be misconstrued to be considered providing a "competitive offering to HashiCorp." Needless to say, we'll be freezing our Nomad version at the last MPL version because of how vague the license is (intentionally).

We also use CockroachDB which uses BSL, but we're not providing a remotely competitive offering.

I'll likely continue to recommend HashiCorp products (Nomad, Consul, Terraform, and Packer) to anyone who asks my advice, but it's disappointing to hear this change.

We maintain a rudimentary SBOM for anyone curious: https://github.com/rivet-gg/rivet/blob/main/docs/infrastruct...

• Vagrant

  115 25,852 9.0 Ruby

  Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing development environments.

  

Someone should fork and maintain Vagrant with an MPL open source license:

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant

• otf

  12 470 0.0 Go

  Discontinued An open source alternative to terraform enterprise.

I've built an [open source clone](https://github.com/leg100/otf) of terraform cloud. Will it contravene BSL?

(1) Under the hood, it forks the terraform binary.

• OpenSearch-Dashboards

  6 1,543 9.8 TypeScript

  📊 Open source visualization dashboards for OpenSearch.

  

I hate OpenSearch with a passion, an absolutely horrid lagging project that can't get basic autocomplete working (https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards/...)

but still manages to suck the air out of the room when you want Elasticsearch because AWS already has the company's billing details and no one wants to figure out paying another provider.

• mgmt

  32 3,399 9.6 Go

  Next generation distributed, event-driven, parallel config management!

I don't think it's good news, but why is anyone surprised? Nobody wants to pay for open source.

Companies want it for free, and individuals don't have enough luxury time to be able to do it themselves.

Prove me wrong and help patch or fund https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and you'll have an even better replacement for terraform!

• Sentry

  266 36,886 10.0 Python

  Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring

  

Sentry, another BUSL licensed project, seems fine? https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/graphs/contributors

• Percona Server

  6 1,090 9.7 C++

  Percona Server

  

- Percona Server for MySQL: https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database/percona-serv...

Other additional examples of successfully commercialised xGPL products with different business models:

- Red Hat Linux: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

• dietlibc

  5 110 10.0 C

  Discontinued Inofficial git-cvs clone of :pserver:[email protected]:/cvs + some changes

- Dietlibc: https://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/

The commercial success of a product totally depends on the business model you come up with, whatever be its opensource (or not) license.

Corporates have a vested interest in promoting the propaganda that only a non-xGPL opensource license can be commercialised successfully simply because they cannot freely steal the source code of a competing xGPL licensed software.

The real value of an FSF license, like the AGPL, is that it was designed to protect the copyright holders, and its users, "right to repair". And thus, it cannot be closed source by anyone (apart from the original copyright holders) once released under the said license (even if future versions are closed source, the old version under xPL remain opensource perpetually). Other open source license (that are less stringent) are prioritised to increase developer contribution. Source code under such license can be closed-source even from the original copyright holder.

But again, commercial success totally depends on the business model you come up with, irrespective of your license. The right license and the right business model will empower each other. Or cripple your business.

• buskill-app

  6 133 7.5 Python

  BusKill's main CLI/GUI app for arming/disarming/configuring the BusKill laptop kill cord

  

• WordPress

  919 18,777 9.9 PHP

  WordPress, Git-ified. This repository is just a mirror of the WordPress subversion repository. Please do not send pull requests. Submit pull requests to https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop and patches to https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ instead.

  

• Moodle

  76 5,388 10.0 PHP

  Moodle - the world's open source learning platform

  

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com sponsored

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

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