The American multicoud specialist HashiCorp is switching to a new license for its products. The company is thus saying goodbye to its open source model.
Software company HashiCorp announces that it is moving to a Business Source license for its products. This means that the American cloud specialist will operate significantly less open source in the near future.
motivation
The announcement came in the form of a blog from HashiCorp co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar. A few months ago he was the keynote speaker at HashiDays in London. He emphasizes that this decision allows HashiCorp to continue investing in its community and allows the company to continue developing open and free-to-use products.
HashiCorp has always relied heavily on FOSS (free and open source software). According to Dadgar, this has created an extensive community that participates in and benefits from the development of HashiCorp products. This open-source model was made possible by thousands of commercial partners, he explains.
However, what is clearly a thorn in the side of Dadgar and HashiCorp is the commercial companies that exploit their open source products and the work of the Hashi community without offering anything in return. Companies that therefore benefit without giving anything back to the online community. According to Dadgar, this contradicts what open source stands for.
Practical
Therefore, HashiCorp believes in further development of commercial open source models. The company is moving from the public Mozilla Public License v2.0 to a more enterprise-focused Business Source license. It applies to all future HashiCorp product launches. APIs, SDKs and almost all other libraries remain MPL 2.0.
BSL 1.1 is a license that allows you to copy, modify, redistribute and non-commercially use products under certain conditions. The implementation of this form of license is associated with a right of use that enables extensive use of the source code. Dadgar assures that extensive consultations have taken place with industry experts and stakeholders to ensure HashiCorp is in line with current industry practice.
The non-commercial use in the new terms and conditions can be adjusted, but a fee is charged for this. Partners can continue to build integrations for mutual customers, and HashiCorp continues to work closely with cloud service providers to ensure mutual support of technologies.
Commercial companies using products developed within the HashiCorp community lose access to future versions or patches and resources to fix bugs. This transition undoubtedly raises a number of questions. This is why HashiCorp offers an FAQ page. The announcement has no impact on the share price for the time being (the company has been public since November 2021).
Source: IT Daily
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