HashiCorp Abandons Open Source for Business Source License
thenewstack.io
Like many other companies, HashiCorp has dropped the open source approach that gave its products their start for the source-available Business Source License (BSL).
  • HashiCorp is moving its products previously licensed as Open Source away from it to Business Source License (BSL) moving forward
  • Terraform is a popular Infrastructure as Code tool used for provisioning cloud resources like AWS, Azure among others
  • Terraform version 1.5.5 and earlier are still open source
  • there is a push for a community maintained open source fork if this decision is not reversed, OpenTF

Gruntwork response on the problem with BSL

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    36·
    1 year ago

    We will see how this plays out… Terraform is awesome but the product would not be very popular today if open source developers hadn’t worked for 10 years for free to maintain and update it.

    Now they take all their work and decides it’s not open source anymore, because hashicorp needs to make money.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
        7·
        1 year ago

        I used pulumi but it’s much worse than terraform. I didn’t used to think so before I learned terraform however.

        My main reason to dislike pulumi is that you have to work around it’s async behavior in python. Maybe it’s better and more natural if you use typescript, but I had to constantly wrap methods in Outputs and other things to get the code to work.

        I had to adapt my code to how pulumi worked all the time. With terraform, I just write it and it works.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
      10·
      1 year ago

      I wonder how many of those “open source developers”, are actually employees of the same companies HashiCorp is accusing now of competing against them. No company is going to pay their employees to contribute to a piece of software, that they then have to buy a license for… so this can very well mean that HashiCorp is cutting off contributions from the same people most capable of contributing in the first place.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
        5·
        1 year ago

        Not so “just”. Terraform open source version went into a fork. Who will work on that one and who will continue with the hashicorp version? It’s a split in the community now, and I bet most devs will continue on the hashicorp version.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
          7·
          1 year ago

          I bet most devs will continue on the hashicorp version

          Only the hobbyist ones. Every dev paid for by a company using the products, will be on the OpenSource fork.

          It’s something companies often forget: open source, and the GPL in particular, is a way for companies to cooperate. Use the AGPL if you want to prevent unfair server-side competition. Switching to the BSL is restricting cooperation to only those with less experience.

          PS: IANAL, but by reading MariaDB’s guidelines for the BSL, HashiCorp may not even have applied it correctly.