If someone is packaging #Hashicorp software and not aware of the license change, and your company uses that downstream software that now pulls in the BUSL code, and your company competes with Hashicorp in some conceivable way (deploys VMs, stores passwords, builds images), is your company now in violation and liable even if the vendor you got it from still has a (now-incompatible) MPL license in their repo? The audits of this are not going to be fun.
Anyone else remember how #MariaDB company adopting the "Business Source License" for MaxScale made MaxScale and the company super-profitable? No one? Oh yeah, that's because it didn't. #Hashicorp#BUSL#opensource
My point is not to convince anyone to stop using #MariaDB - definitely do - it's absolutely awesome and #opensource. It happens to be awesome because it is owned by a Foundation that guarded it against the Company doing exactly what #Hashicorp just did. I also can't think of a reason why #Hashicorp won't enjoy similar outcomes to MariaDB Company. Hopefully, the common tools (Terraform, Vault) will get forked and maintained by a Foundation. The company is screwed. It's only a matter of time.
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 😕
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 💪
HashiCorp changes license from Mozilla Public License 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1 on their products (www.hashicorp.com)