Terraform, Vault, Nomad etc by HashiCorp moving away from Open Source
Terraform, Vault, Nomad etc by HashiCorp moving away from Open Source
Like many other companies, HashiCorp has dropped the open source approach that gave its products their start for the source-available Business Source License (BSL).
- HashiCorp is moving its products previously licensed as Open Source away from it to Business Source License (BSL) moving forward
- Terraform is a popular Infrastructure as Code tool used for provisioning cloud resources like AWS, Azure among others
- Terraform version 1.5.5 and earlier are still open source
- there is a push for a community maintained open source fork if this decision is not reversed, OpenTF
Gruntwork response on the problem with BSL
- https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-open-ab0b9ba65bca?gi=be31818bcbaf
- Gruntwork is a creator of the tool Terragrunt which is an open source wrapper around Terraform to provide some additional tools for it
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For the people who continue to work on the open source fork of terraform, can HashiCorp pull their commits into their closed source BSL fork?
I would assume not, but I am curious if there's some weird workaround of their previous license that they still own contributions
The integrations with other services are implemented in plugins which are separate programs, that are installed separately, and communicate with the core over RPC. I would imagine these plugins can continue to be licensed however their owners choose. I think this license change just applies to core.
Before a contributor's code is accepted the contributor must sign a CLA which grants Hashicorp a license to do whatever to what is contributed. See: https://www.hashicorp.com/cla
Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HashiCorp and to recipients of software distributed by HashiCorp a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works.
ouch... Well, with the fork they wont have to do that anymore... so thats good.
When Canonical originally had such a CLA to contribute to Ubuntu it was pretty controversial (I don’t think it was common at all at the time), this situation with HashiCorp perfectly demonstrates why.
I’m not as familiar with MPLv2 but I don’t think they can with contributions to the fork. Since those contributions won’t be part of the original “we own all your work” agreement they couldn’t simply close source those contributions.
From the BSL FAQ:
Q: I have written a code patch to a BSL project and would like the BSL vendor to maintain the code as part of the BSL project. How do I contribute it?
A: License your code using the “new BSD” license or dedicate it to the public domain. Code contributions under “new BSD” is compatible with BSL. See BSD on Wikipedia.
That would seem to rule out the MPLv2.
That is for continuing contributions to the commercial project, the fork should be using the old license not the BSL.
If HashiCorp is unwilling to switch Terraform back to an open source license, we propose to fork the legacy MPL-licensed Terraform
The question was if HashiCorp could take contributions to the fork and put them into their commercial product.
That means HashiCorp could only take contributions licensed under the BSD or public domain, or under a CLA. The fork would be none of those.