HashiCorp changes license from Mozilla Public License 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1 on their products
HashiCorp adopts the Business Source License to ensure continued investment in its community and to continue providing open, freely available products.
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 š
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 šŖ
From my reading this wouldn't impact organisations just using the product at all. Only probiders that offer services should be impacted. Similar to what Elastic did with their license.
Note I didn't actually read the license text, just browsed the FAQ a bit
I appreciate Grafana going in the opposite direction and relicensing under the AGPL. it largely serves the same purpose but it provides a stronger guarantee for users.
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
Curious, how will AWS be affected? I'm not familiar with all of Hashicorp's tools. Mostly just Terraform (and obvs AWS had Cloud Formation, then CDK - they even worked with HashiCorp I believe to build CDKTF).
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.
The biggest problem I see is that you can suddenly become non-compliant just because Hashicorp decides to release a new service (i.e.they start competing with you, rather than the other way). It can be a huge risk for companies.
The FAQ covers this:
- If I want to build a product that is competitive with HashiCorp, does that mean Iām now prevented from using any HashiCorp tools under the BSL license?
No. The BSL license does not prevent developers from using our tools to build competing products. For example, if someone built a product competitive with Vault, it would be permissible to deploy that product with Terraform. Similarly, if someone built a competitive product to Terraform, they could use Vault to secure it. What the BSL license would not allow is hosting or embedding Terraform in order to compete with Terraform, or hosting or embedding Vault to compete with Vault.
So if you are selling a product and HashiCorp releases a product which competes with yours, you can still use Valut, Terraform, etc the way you had been. I can't see a way for your senario to play out based on their FAQ.
So it would seem it's always a good idea to contact them, get a commercial license or custom licensing terms (they do seem open to that from what I gather here and here) before building a business on top of their software.
Probably works well if you are an established company, but why would e.g. a startup pick licensing headaches over the competition? I imagine bigger companies would also rather just move to e.g. CDK or ARM if they don't need multiple providers (at least our company started discussing this today).
What kind of "custom licensing" do you anyway think a 5-person startup would get?
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.
was about to include it in my stack, guess i wont be now.
What does this mean?š¤
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.