Relicensing as a Threat or Risk (UPDATED)
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All kinds of licenses
After the recent news that HashiCorp has changed the licenses of its hitherto-open-source products, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the licenses that have sprung up around PostgreSQL and adjacent and related communities, since quite a bit has changed there recently, and it’s hard to keep track.
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Open charter companies and relicensing
But what sparked this particular bit of thinking was Sid Sijbrandij’s response: “HashiCorp switching to BSL shows a need for open charter companies”. Now, Sijbrandij is the cofounder of GitLab, which is at the time of this writing a 7 billion dollar market cap public company which is built on MIT-licensed open source software. He knows what he’s talking about.
I, on the other hand, am not a lawyer like Kyle or a billionaire like Sij. But I’ve been interested in the business of open source since high school (fun fact, I wrote my International Baccalaureate thesis on the subject), and have seen the lifecycle of one of the open core companies, and I would like to roll the idea around for a little bit.
UPDATE
Detailed LWN article:
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HashiCorp, Terraform, and OpenTF
Over the years, there have been multiple examples of open-source software that, suddenly, was no longer open source; on August 10, some further examples were added to the pile. That happened when HashiCorp announced that it would be switching the license on its products from the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL) to the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL or BUSL). At least one of the products affected by the change, the Terraform infrastructure-automation tool, has attracted an effort to continue it as an open-source tool in the form of a fork that would be maintained by the nascent OpenTF Foundation. That seems like a sensible reaction to the move, but it also helps serve up yet another reminder that code which is controlled by a single entity is normally always at risk of such adverse changes.
As with other companies that have taken this path, HashiCorp has evidently felt an economic pinch that it believes it can solve by forcing ""other vendors who take advantage of pure OSS models, and the community work on OSS projects, for their own commercial goals"" to commercially license its products. But it does so at the risk of alienating (or completely chasing away) the community that has built up around its products. That community provides at least some of the benefit that comes from HashiCorp's products, of course. HashiCorp is either convinced it can go it alone or believes that the community will simply have little choice but to continue even in the face of the change.
The intent of the move, which is further described in a lengthy FAQ, seems relatively benign at some level; it only targets those companies that are ""providing competitive offerings to HashiCorp"". The FAQ goes on to explain that such an offering ""is a product that is sold to third parties, including through paid support arrangements, that significantly overlaps the capabilities of a HashiCorp commercial product"". It is certainly true that there are problems and inequities in sustaining FOSS, but it is not at all clear that running away from FOSS entirely is a viable path to sustainability either.
Late coverage:
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HashiCorp Retools Licenses And Software To Grow Its Business - The Next Platform
It is hard to make a living in the open source software business, although it is possible, through the contributions of many, to make great software. In many ways, HashiCorp is arguably the standard bearer for the next wave of commercialized open source, much the way Red Hat was two and a half decades ago with the second wave the saw the rise of Linux and the death, pretty much, of Unix.
The first wave of open source, of course, was in the academic roots of computing, when Unix, C, a zillion databases and file systems and all kinds of stuff for Unix platforms were created. Once software became copyrightable in 1974 and once computing became a big business as Moore’s Law exponentially scaled down the cost of hardware and ever-inflating human costs continually scaled up the cost of software in the next decade, it was inevitable that software would start closing up code and opening up shop.
Change of plans:
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OpenTF pulls the trigger on its open-source Terraform fork
The OpenTF Foundation didn't want to fork Terraform, but HashiCorp gave it no choice. HashiCorp's recent decision to shift Terraform licensing to the non-open-source Business Source License (BSL) is fixed in stone. Thus, as the OpenTF Foundation said it would in the OpenTF manifesto if HashICorp refused to return Terraform to the Mozilla Public License (MPL) v2.0, the newly formed foundation is forking the code.
Or, did they? Scalr CEO Sebastian Stadil told The Register, “Our view is that we’re actually not the fork because we’re just changing the name, but it’s the same project under the same license. Our position is that the fork is actually HashiCorp that has forked its own projects under a different license.”