this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Programming

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HashiCorp changes license from Mozilla Public License 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1 on their products (www.hashicorp.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by starman to c/programming
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[–] sweng 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The biggest problem I see is that you can suddenly become non-compliant just because Hashicorp decides to release a new service (i.e.they start competing with you, rather than the other way). It can be a huge risk for companies.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The FAQ covers this:

  1. If I want to build a product that is competitive with HashiCorp, does that mean I’m now prevented from using any HashiCorp tools under the BSL license?

No. The BSL license does not prevent developers from using our tools to build competing products. For example, if someone built a product competitive with Vault, it would be permissible to deploy that product with Terraform. Similarly, if someone built a competitive product to Terraform, they could use Vault to secure it. What the BSL license would not allow is hosting or embedding Terraform in order to compete with Terraform, or hosting or embedding Vault to compete with Vault.

So if you are selling a product and HashiCorp releases a product which competes with yours, you can still use Valut, Terraform, etc the way you had been. I can't see a way for your senario to play out based on their FAQ.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So it would seem it's always a good idea to contact them, get a commercial license or custom licensing terms (they do seem open to that from what I gather here and here) before building a business on top of their software.

[–] sweng 8 points 1 year ago

Probably works well if you are an established company, but why would e.g. a startup pick licensing headaches over the competition? I imagine bigger companies would also rather just move to e.g. CDK or ARM if they don't need multiple providers (at least our company started discussing this today).

What kind of "custom licensing" do you anyway think a 5-person startup would get?