Chris HoldgrafHashicorp changes the terraform license to BSL.
tl;dr if you use terraform in a product, you're gonna have to lawyer up if you do anything remotely related to what hashicorp does now or in the future.
KirstieJane@choldgraf woah! So. Like. Not an open license? Right?
@KirstieJane most definitely not. It basically says you can't use it if you're a competitor. The BSL "transforms" into an OSI-approved license after enough time has passed that the codebase at that time is no longer much value.
But the definition of "competitor" is broad and requires lawyers to determine so in practice it means you can't build anything that makes money on top of it without extensive legal counsel, IMO.
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras@choldgraf @KirstieJane yeah, the delay is so much it’s basically guaranteed to be all bit-rot by the time it’s actually open source.
@gedankenstuecke @KirstieJane also regardless of the delay the amount of uncertainty injected by their definition of "can't compete with us" means that the license is much riskier (read: needs lots of legal counsel) if you're trying to build a product or service that uses terraform
@choldgraf @KirstieJane yeah, just to say that you can't get around that uncertainty by just waiting it out!
Ghislain Vaillant@choldgraf HashiCorp goes proprietary. Disappointing, although not surprising considering the current trend of cloud-focused projects switching to a proprietary model.
The gimmick of mentioning the code will eventually become open source after a long period of time (4 years) is particularly infuriating. I wonder who's gonna risk deploying such an old and potentially vulnerable version of the software in its right mind.
@ghisvail nobody will, IMO it's just a way to try and have the benefits of open source marketing without actually making your technology open source
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦@choldgraf I like that it's at least clear that their new terms are a BS License. 👀
@rysiek I am not a fan of the BSL license but I don't hold it against them to use it. What I think sucks is that they built a brand and product with a community based on a very different licensing model, and are now pulling the rug out from that community now that it suits them.
@choldgraf oh sure, the bait-and-switch is *the* issue.
I do think BSL and similar licenses tend to be specifically designed to muddy the waters of what is and isn't "FLOSS", and are quite often used specifically for that purpose.
And it does seem to me Hashicorp is using this license also for that purpose. I mean:
> We strongly believe in the value of openly sharing source code and enabling practitioners to solve their problems, building communities, and creating transparency.
🙄
@choldgraf obviously Hashicorp can license their products any way they want.
But then there's the question of independent contributors. I am going to bet there's a bunch of code in Terraform that got committed by independent devs under MPL. Did they assign the copyright to Hashicorp? How is this code being re-licensed as BSL instead of MPL?
Would they have contributed to Terraform etc if the license had been BSL from the start? Would they have had they known it gets re-licensed later?..
@rysiek yeah it feels like one lesson to learn here is that any codebase that requires you to sign away your rights in order to contribute is a big red flag. Unless you have a very good understanding of the governance behind the codebase and you're still ok with it.
flere-imsaho 🇺🇦@choldgraf oh, i don't have such qualms, it's a typical “fuck you, got mine” move. hashicorp-made billionaires can get fucked.
Timothy Wolodzko@choldgraf TFW you could have used a BSD license but the sales guy misspelled it as BSL…