5 ms·

The issue never seems as big a deal to me as others make it out to be… when a company switches the license, it is only for new development going forward. Any ve

The issue never seems as big a deal to me as others make it out to be… when a company switches the license, it is only for new development going forward. Any versions you were already using continue to have the same license, and you can keep using them. The only thing you are losing is (perhaps) the ability to continue to receive free patches and updates from the project. This is no different than if the company went out of business completely. You can still make your own updates to the last OS version, and you are free to solicit contributions from others to your fork. Is Hashicorp switching to a BSL any more disruptive to users of the software than if Hashicorp went out of business?

depr 3y ago
If they went out of business, then there would be a fork of their projects which would be adopted by some foundation or a new foundation would be created. It would be clear that these forks are where new development would be happening and everyone would migrate to them. If Terraform is forked now, there will be two Terraforms, bringing all kinds of complications, so going out of business is definitely different.
- m4rtink 3y ago
  After the license change the company & project is pretty much dead for any existing users & the will move to the fork.
  - tzs 3y ago
    I doubt that. For companies using HashiCorp products just to manage their internal IT stuff the license change only affects that if their business is providing products or services that compete with the HashiCorp products and services they use. I would be surprised if more than a tiny fraction of their customers do so.
    - growse 3y ago
      Nobody has any clue what "competing with Hashicorp" actually means now, or what it might mean in the future (what if Oracle buys Hashicorp?). It's vaguely defined deliberately. Most businesses don't like to take vague legal risks.
      - oakhaven 3y ago
        I thought it just means "pulumi"
capableweb 3y ago
> Is Hashicorp switching to a BSL any more disruptive to users of the software than if Hashicorp went out of business? Yes. If they went out of the business, the software development would probably grind to halt before/unless the community manages to rescue the project. But if they don't, and instead they "just" change to a license which states you cannot be a competitor and use the project, then that runs the risk of you being sued and pulled into legal battles with another company, usually something you'd like to avoid. So imagine I today use nomad for something, and Hashicorp doesn't have any hosted version of nomad, so I'm in the clear. But who knows what will happen in the future? As soon as Hashicorp does anything that could look like competition to what I already offer, my usage of nomad is now at risk, and in addition my entire business is at risk because they would sue me unless I remove nomad quickly. It would be stupid not to move far away from any BSL projects as soon as you can, unless your entire business model is to get into legal battles with others.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  Why would you be sued for using a version from before the license change? Aka the last version you'd be able to use anyway if they went out of business.
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    You wouldn't but the issue is that you wouldn't be using the maintained version (which is currently the BSL version). If they eventually went out of business instead, the community could at least attempt to pick up the torch and even if development slowly petered out, you'd have a decent runway during which you could migrate to something else. With them changing to BSL, all updates to the MPL version stopped immediately when the change was announced. Your runway is now exactly up to the point where a critical vulnerability is discovered and puts your project and your clients at risk. Or you tread into uncertain legal territory and hope that they don't try to smite you while you figure out what to use next.
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      > If they eventually went out of business instead, the community could at least attempt to pick up the torch and even if development slowly petered out, you'd have a decent runway during which you could migrate to something else. That can also happen without the company going out of business, the community's efforts simply need to be based on the last version before the license change. See for instance how OpenZFS development continues even though Oracle is still around.
maxboone 3y ago
Harder to do cleanroom on a fork though
- zwily 3y ago
  Why do you need to do a clean room? The fork is of Open Source code.
  - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    I assume they mean that all future work on open forks must be prepared to defend itself against accusations of copying work that might take place on the BSL upstream (especially given that the starting points for both are identical codebases, meaning future fixes/enhancements will have a high likelihood of doing similar things). This burden did not exist before the license change.
  - maxboone 3y ago
    Because Hashicorp will implement features in Terraform under BSL which people will request on your fork. It's hard to avoid people contributing similar or identical code, and thus violating the BSL license.
    - fishnchips 3y ago
      Two points here. One - the burden of proof lies on the accuser, obviously. Two - this has apparently never been tested in court.
troyvit 3y ago
To answer your question, no. Hashicorp switching to a BSL isn't any more disruptive than if they went out of business. My personal concern is that it's much easier for a company to change its licensing than it is for that company to go out of business, and it seems more formerly open companies are choosing to do so. That's the focus of the article as well.
- tbrownaw 3y ago
  > Hashicorp switching to a BSL isn't any more disruptive than if they went out of business. Eh. Forking a still-OSS version is an actual fork, where taking over development if they got bus-factored wouldn't be.
toast0 3y ago
> The issue never seems as big a deal to me as others make it out to be… when a company switches the license, it is only for new development going forward. Any versions you were already using continue to have the same license, and you can keep using them. This is true, but depending on the company, they may shutdown their distribution of the older releases, so if you don't have an archive, you're out of luck; possibly very quickly with zero notice. Had they gone out of business, chances are there were signs that might have lead you to start an archive ahead of time. git makes things a bit easier, as it's an archive by default, but if there were useful documents outside of git, that's an issue.
ketralnis 3y ago
Sadly the days of "keep using the software" are mostly over. Between security updates and platforms frequently making backwards-incompatible changes you'll hit the wall eventually. The rest of the world has opted into the continous deathmarch treadmill and you're on it too whether you like it or not. We don't value stability, and we berate people for running software that's older than 4 months as positively geriatric and asking for any trouble they might have. Want to keep running that old package? Cross an ubuntu versioning chasm and now you also need an ancient version of glibc which won't run on your Zany Zamboni fleet because your other requirement of libxml 5 won't work with it. Find a security problem? Well there's a newer version that's only been out for four minutes why aren't you on that already anyway? Oh we don't publish packages for your 4 week old npm yarn bower neonode, who still uses that?
- davidgerard 3y ago
  everyone knows how to run binaries portably on Linux! use the win32 binary under Wine
  - nickstinemates 3y ago
    which version of wine?
- dustingetz 3y ago
  those same businesses are spending $2M/yr on salesforce
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    Mind if I ask how is this related to the topic?
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  True, but I think the "continous deathmarch treadmill" is the real problem, well above any license changes.
lijok 3y ago
For Terraform specifically, not receiving updates is not an option. Within 6 months or so, you will stop receiving support for new, and some existing features of the big three cloud providers.
- devonbleak 3y ago
  The providers are what implements the actual interaction/features with the cloud providers, and those licenses have not changed - it's just terraform core at this point. So really you have until HashiCorp changes the interface between TF core and the providers, which would mean something like a Terraform v2.0.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    This is an important point. The bulk of what matters isn't changing licenses. I wish this Terraform change hadn't happened, but in the scope of everything I don't think it matters to the vast majority of people. Unless you're building your product on top of Terraform, it doesn't make a big difference.
  - lijok 3y ago
    I overstated the timeline. The providers have minimum required Terraform versions, but I just checked the latest version of the AWS provider and it requires at least Terraform 0.13, which is over two years old now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
beachy 3y ago
This is a good analysis and touches on the issue of entitlement. All of the company's work to date remains available free and in perpetuity. The complaint can only be that the company has changed course and will not commit to providing future new stuff for free. The only way this complaint is valid is if there was a bait and switch - the company pretended that their new stuff would also be free forever. Without intimate kniwledge, I'd venture that Hashicorp never said anything of the kind and they're just trying to make a buck like the rest of us. The more this happens, the less people will hold the naive view that for-product entities will by default keep providing stuff for free forever. Capitalism baby.
- dwaite 3y ago
  > The only way this complaint is valid is if there was a bait and switch There is a bait and switch, just not the one you proposed. If Terraform had started off under the BSL, it would have significantly less adoption. As is, people adopted it under evaluation of the old terms, and are now being told the terms are changing going forward. Since the previous code is still available, this will likely hurt newer, smaller players more than larger established players - if you are offering a large commercial offering on terraform today, you will likely justify maintaining a vendor fork going forward, or contributing to a genuine new fork project like OpenTF. > The more this happens, the less people will hold the naive view that for-product entities will by default keep providing stuff for free forever. Capitalism baby. Historically the successful companies had a clear view of what was free and what was charged - e.g. Redhat binary and source distributions were free, but enterprise distributions, commercial support, professional certifications as well as custom software/professional services were all revenue channels. The rise of more asymmetric licensing terms (e.g. sole corporate copyright with publication under AGPLv3) has been an ongoing change as companies have wanted the freedom to change where they get their money over time, and defend from other members in the community potentially competing against them.
rmbyrro 3y ago
All this discussion shows that the real value is in maintaining the software, not just the software itself. What these companies are doing is basically abandoning the open source code they developed with the support of a huge community. They're developing new software, using OSS contributions, giving a middle finger to the OSS community. If you don't care, fine. But to me this is a considerable deal.
lemper 3y ago
definitely agree. the more i see something like this, the more i see it as people keep wanting to get freebies for free while keep generating obscene amount of money out of it. nothing more, nothing less.
quijoteuniv 3y ago
I think what is disruptive is “there’s shareholder pressure to generate higher revenues” and this seems to be accepted as a given.
dwaite 3y ago
Companies rarely switch from BSD to a commercial license - they are moving from a highly commercially restrictive license like (A)GPLv3 to something even stronger. These are typically very unbalanced relationships between the project "owner" and any contributors - the "owner" may require CLAs and copyright assignment, and reserve the sole right to relicense the code under any license they see fit - but for these sorts of more restrictive relicensing exercises and for an exclusive rights to sell under non-open/copyleft "commercially friendly" licensing. The anger and frustration usually come from thinking that even though the relationship was unbalanced, there was an understanding and social contract where both a community member and the commercial enterprise got value. The relicensing is unbalanced - it removes value from the community member without providing any new benefit. Sure, they can quit the community, but that also removes the sources of their value. In the most extreme cases, there have been successful attempts to create entirely new communities (strangely these are predominantly around Oracle-owned projects like MySQL, Hudson, OpenOffice). There is interest in creating a community Redhat-like distribution in the face of RHEL changes, and the HashiCorp change has prompted some to consider new efforts like OpenTF. To your question, BSL provides additional legal ammo and changes some contributors to competitors, so it is indeed quite different than if the company going out of business.
jhoelzel 3y ago
the irony is that most people affected by this change have business licenses applied to their products....
- fishnchips 3y ago
  So does Hashi! They have closed-source products like Terraform Cloud, and nobody's crying foul here. There's nothing wrong IMO with starting a project with a commercial license if you intend to build a business. The community outrage is mainly directed at the bait-and-switch scheme from a company that was praising the FOSS model left, right and center even earlier this year until they've suddenly changed their mind entirely
  - jhoelzel 3y ago
    but bait and switch would entail that its a) either no longer open source or b) no longer usable you simply should not be able to make money of it without giving back to the original source owners. It makes me wonder how many FOS projects might still be in full swing if we actually gave some of the value back we generated too
    - fishnchips 3y ago
      What does "giving back" mean? [edit] And yes, it's no longer open source. BUSL is not an open-source license.
      - jhoelzel 3y ago
        yes it is. its just not a "do what you please with it" license, but you can still see and modify the source to your own liking
        fishnchips 3y ago
        Even Hashi no longer considers it an open-source license. What other argument do you need?

depr 3y ago

If they went out of business, then there would be a fork of their projects which would be adopted by some foundation or a new foundation would be created. It would be clear that these forks are where new development would be happening and everyone would migrate to them. If Terraform is forked now, there will be two Terraforms, bringing all kinds of complications, so going out of business is definitely different.

m4rtink 3y ago
After the license change the company & project is pretty much dead for any existing users & the will move to the fork.
- tzs 3y ago
  I doubt that. For companies using HashiCorp products just to manage their internal IT stuff the license change only affects that if their business is providing products or services that compete with the HashiCorp products and services they use. I would be surprised if more than a tiny fraction of their customers do so.
  - growse 3y ago
    Nobody has any clue what "competing with Hashicorp" actually means now, or what it might mean in the future (what if Oracle buys Hashicorp?). It's vaguely defined deliberately. Most businesses don't like to take vague legal risks.
    - oakhaven 3y ago
      I thought it just means "pulumi"

capableweb 3y ago

> Is Hashicorp switching to a BSL any more disruptive to users of the software than if Hashicorp went out of business? Yes. If they went out of the business, the software development would probably grind to halt before/unless the community manages to rescue the project. But if they don't, and instead they "just" change to a license which states you cannot be a competitor and use the project, then that runs the risk of you being sued and pulled into legal battles with another company, usually something you'd like to avoid. So imagine I today use nomad for something, and Hashicorp doesn't have any hosted version of nomad, so I'm in the clear. But who knows what will happen in the future? As soon as Hashicorp does anything that could look like competition to what I already offer, my usage of nomad is now at risk, and in addition my entire business is at risk because they would sue me unless I remove nomad quickly. It would be stupid not to move far away from any BSL projects as soon as you can, unless your entire business model is to get into legal battles with others.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
Why would you be sued for using a version from before the license change? Aka the last version you'd be able to use anyway if they went out of business.
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  You wouldn't but the issue is that you wouldn't be using the maintained version (which is currently the BSL version). If they eventually went out of business instead, the community could at least attempt to pick up the torch and even if development slowly petered out, you'd have a decent runway during which you could migrate to something else. With them changing to BSL, all updates to the MPL version stopped immediately when the change was announced. Your runway is now exactly up to the point where a critical vulnerability is discovered and puts your project and your clients at risk. Or you tread into uncertain legal territory and hope that they don't try to smite you while you figure out what to use next.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    > If they eventually went out of business instead, the community could at least attempt to pick up the torch and even if development slowly petered out, you'd have a decent runway during which you could migrate to something else. That can also happen without the company going out of business, the community's efforts simply need to be based on the last version before the license change. See for instance how OpenZFS development continues even though Oracle is still around.

maxboone 3y ago

Harder to do cleanroom on a fork though

zwily 3y ago
Why do you need to do a clean room? The fork is of Open Source code.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  I assume they mean that all future work on open forks must be prepared to defend itself against accusations of copying work that might take place on the BSL upstream (especially given that the starting points for both are identical codebases, meaning future fixes/enhancements will have a high likelihood of doing similar things). This burden did not exist before the license change.
- maxboone 3y ago
  Because Hashicorp will implement features in Terraform under BSL which people will request on your fork. It's hard to avoid people contributing similar or identical code, and thus violating the BSL license.
  - fishnchips 3y ago
    Two points here. One - the burden of proof lies on the accuser, obviously. Two - this has apparently never been tested in court.

troyvit 3y ago

To answer your question, no. Hashicorp switching to a BSL isn't any more disruptive than if they went out of business. My personal concern is that it's much easier for a company to change its licensing than it is for that company to go out of business, and it seems more formerly open companies are choosing to do so. That's the focus of the article as well.

tbrownaw 3y ago
> Hashicorp switching to a BSL isn't any more disruptive than if they went out of business. Eh. Forking a still-OSS version is an actual fork, where taking over development if they got bus-factored wouldn't be.

toast0 3y ago

> The issue never seems as big a deal to me as others make it out to be… when a company switches the license, it is only for new development going forward. Any versions you were already using continue to have the same license, and you can keep using them. This is true, but depending on the company, they may shutdown their distribution of the older releases, so if you don't have an archive, you're out of luck; possibly very quickly with zero notice. Had they gone out of business, chances are there were signs that might have lead you to start an archive ahead of time. git makes things a bit easier, as it's an archive by default, but if there were useful documents outside of git, that's an issue.

ketralnis 3y ago

Sadly the days of "keep using the software" are mostly over. Between security updates and platforms frequently making backwards-incompatible changes you'll hit the wall eventually. The rest of the world has opted into the continous deathmarch treadmill and you're on it too whether you like it or not. We don't value stability, and we berate people for running software that's older than 4 months as positively geriatric and asking for any trouble they might have. Want to keep running that old package? Cross an ubuntu versioning chasm and now you also need an ancient version of glibc which won't run on your Zany Zamboni fleet because your other requirement of libxml 5 won't work with it. Find a security problem? Well there's a newer version that's only been out for four minutes why aren't you on that already anyway? Oh we don't publish packages for your 4 week old npm yarn bower neonode, who still uses that?

davidgerard 3y ago
everyone knows how to run binaries portably on Linux! use the win32 binary under Wine
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  which version of wine?
dustingetz 3y ago
those same businesses are spending $2M/yr on salesforce
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Mind if I ask how is this related to the topic?
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
True, but I think the "continous deathmarch treadmill" is the real problem, well above any license changes.

lijok 3y ago

For Terraform specifically, not receiving updates is not an option. Within 6 months or so, you will stop receiving support for new, and some existing features of the big three cloud providers.

devonbleak 3y ago
The providers are what implements the actual interaction/features with the cloud providers, and those licenses have not changed - it's just terraform core at this point. So really you have until HashiCorp changes the interface between TF core and the providers, which would mean something like a Terraform v2.0.
- freedomben 3y ago
  This is an important point. The bulk of what matters isn't changing licenses. I wish this Terraform change hadn't happened, but in the scope of everything I don't think it matters to the vast majority of people. Unless you're building your product on top of Terraform, it doesn't make a big difference.
- lijok 3y ago
  I overstated the timeline. The providers have minimum required Terraform versions, but I just checked the latest version of the AWS provider and it requires at least Terraform 0.13, which is over two years old now.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

beachy 3y ago

This is a good analysis and touches on the issue of entitlement. All of the company's work to date remains available free and in perpetuity. The complaint can only be that the company has changed course and will not commit to providing future new stuff for free. The only way this complaint is valid is if there was a bait and switch - the company pretended that their new stuff would also be free forever. Without intimate kniwledge, I'd venture that Hashicorp never said anything of the kind and they're just trying to make a buck like the rest of us. The more this happens, the less people will hold the naive view that for-product entities will by default keep providing stuff for free forever. Capitalism baby.

dwaite 3y ago
> The only way this complaint is valid is if there was a bait and switch There is a bait and switch, just not the one you proposed. If Terraform had started off under the BSL, it would have significantly less adoption. As is, people adopted it under evaluation of the old terms, and are now being told the terms are changing going forward. Since the previous code is still available, this will likely hurt newer, smaller players more than larger established players - if you are offering a large commercial offering on terraform today, you will likely justify maintaining a vendor fork going forward, or contributing to a genuine new fork project like OpenTF. > The more this happens, the less people will hold the naive view that for-product entities will by default keep providing stuff for free forever. Capitalism baby. Historically the successful companies had a clear view of what was free and what was charged - e.g. Redhat binary and source distributions were free, but enterprise distributions, commercial support, professional certifications as well as custom software/professional services were all revenue channels. The rise of more asymmetric licensing terms (e.g. sole corporate copyright with publication under AGPLv3) has been an ongoing change as companies have wanted the freedom to change where they get their money over time, and defend from other members in the community potentially competing against them.

rmbyrro 3y ago

All this discussion shows that the real value is in maintaining the software, not just the software itself. What these companies are doing is basically abandoning the open source code they developed with the support of a huge community. They're developing new software, using OSS contributions, giving a middle finger to the OSS community. If you don't care, fine. But to me this is a considerable deal.

lemper 3y ago

definitely agree. the more i see something like this, the more i see it as people keep wanting to get freebies for free while keep generating obscene amount of money out of it. nothing more, nothing less.

quijoteuniv 3y ago

I think what is disruptive is “there’s shareholder pressure to generate higher revenues” and this seems to be accepted as a given.

dwaite 3y ago

Companies rarely switch from BSD to a commercial license - they are moving from a highly commercially restrictive license like (A)GPLv3 to something even stronger. These are typically very unbalanced relationships between the project "owner" and any contributors - the "owner" may require CLAs and copyright assignment, and reserve the sole right to relicense the code under any license they see fit - but for these sorts of more restrictive relicensing exercises and for an exclusive rights to sell under non-open/copyleft "commercially friendly" licensing. The anger and frustration usually come from thinking that even though the relationship was unbalanced, there was an understanding and social contract where both a community member and the commercial enterprise got value. The relicensing is unbalanced - it removes value from the community member without providing any new benefit. Sure, they can quit the community, but that also removes the sources of their value. In the most extreme cases, there have been successful attempts to create entirely new communities (strangely these are predominantly around Oracle-owned projects like MySQL, Hudson, OpenOffice). There is interest in creating a community Redhat-like distribution in the face of RHEL changes, and the HashiCorp change has prompted some to consider new efforts like OpenTF. To your question, BSL provides additional legal ammo and changes some contributors to competitors, so it is indeed quite different than if the company going out of business.

jhoelzel 3y ago

the irony is that most people affected by this change have business licenses applied to their products....

fishnchips 3y ago
So does Hashi! They have closed-source products like Terraform Cloud, and nobody's crying foul here. There's nothing wrong IMO with starting a project with a commercial license if you intend to build a business. The community outrage is mainly directed at the bait-and-switch scheme from a company that was praising the FOSS model left, right and center even earlier this year until they've suddenly changed their mind entirely
- jhoelzel 3y ago
  but bait and switch would entail that its a) either no longer open source or b) no longer usable you simply should not be able to make money of it without giving back to the original source owners. It makes me wonder how many FOS projects might still be in full swing if we actually gave some of the value back we generated too
  - fishnchips 3y ago
    What does "giving back" mean? [edit] And yes, it's no longer open source. BUSL is not an open-source license.
    - jhoelzel 3y ago
      yes it is. its just not a "do what you please with it" license, but you can still see and modify the source to your own liking
      - fishnchips 3y ago
        Even Hashi no longer considers it an open-source license. What other argument do you need?