HashiCorp adopts the Business Source License to ensure continued investment in its community and to continue providing open, freely available products.

No more open source.

Vendors who provide competitive services built on our community products will no longer be able to incorporate future releases, bug fixes, or security patches contributed to our products.

  • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.comEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    People contributed to HashiCorp products - the software is not something solely made by HashiCorp. This might technically be legal under their CLA and indeed even in the absence of the CLA, under the Apache License, but it certainly isn’t fair to people who contributed to it voluntarily in the expectation it would form part of a Free software project.

    I think maybe the best way to combat this type of thing in the future is if F/L/OSS communities (i.e. everyone who contributes to a project without being paid) starts: 1) preferencing copyleft projects over BSD/MIT type licenses, and 2) refusing to sign any kind of CLA (maybe with an exception for obligate non-profit organisations). Then, companies will either have to pick developing entirely at their own cost, or to accept contributions on the incoming=outgoing model, meaning they are also bound by the copyleft licence and are forced to keep it as Free software. That would end the bait-and-switch of getting people to work on your product for free and then saying “surprise suckers, it’s no longer Free software!”.

    • Pixel@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      All the contributions are still open, we just have to fork it - which is exactly what I’m waiting for

    • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
      1·
      1 year ago

      Where I don’t disagree with anything you say here, someone who contributes to a project with a license like this should already be aware and have accepted that it may ultimately be taken out of their hands, and that’s fine if that’s what they want to do. In fact, I prefer it for some types of software (I can’t think of a better way to promote adoption of reference designs such as TCP/IP). That said, if the idea of working with a group and losing control or access to it is a problem for you, then by all means don’t do so and tell others of the risks.

      • einsteinx2@programming.dev
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yep my go to is MIT for libraries/frameworks and GPL for full applications. I don’t want to restrict the use of my libraries to only GPL code unless I have a specific reason to do so.