What does this mean?🤔
Given I was recently involved in minimising the impact of Lightbend’s similar move earlier this year, AFAIU it means their products will be conditionally open source. They’ll be free to use for non-commercial use but you’d need to pay for anything else.
There is no such thing as “conditionally open source.” The license terms you describe are just “not open source.”
If they actually gave a shit about commercial entities contributing back, they should’ve gone AGPL3. This is just a money grab and yet another example of how permissive licensing isn’t good enough and everything should be copyleft.
There’s no need to AFAIU when their FAQ explains all the detail, which is that commercial production use is fine as long as you’re not using it to build a competitor product to Hashicorp.
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.
The FAQ covers this:
- 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.
