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Summarize this content to 100 words Yesterday, August 10, HashiCorp co-founder Armon Dadgar announced on the company’s official blog that they are transferring all their products from Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to a slightly redesigned one Business Source License v1.1. At the same time, Armon promised that “API, SDK and almost all libraries will remain under MPL 2.0. The changes have already affected such popular tools as Terraform, Nomad, Vaut, Vagrant, Packer. But here Consul also available under MPL.The reason is quite typical for recent times: the company’s achievements are used for commercial purposes, the authors want to control the commercial use of their products, especially when competing services are built on their basis. However, if the same MariaDB mentioned in the HashiCorp announcement uses BSL only in a limited set of components, keeping the core (that is, the MariaDB DBMS itself) an Open Source project, then HashiCorp translates its products to BSL completely:There are vendors who benefit from the pure OSS model and community contributions to OSS projects, without providing material contributions back to the community. We do not believe this is in keeping with the spirit of Open Source. Vendors that provide competing services based on our open source products will no longer be able to add future releases, fixes, or security updates to them.As a reminder, the BSL license is not an Open Source license in the full sense of the word, because it contradicts the first and third criteria of the OSD definition, formulated by the Open Source Initiative:1. Free distributionThe license shall not restrict any party from selling or freely transferring the software as a component of a software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license does not require royalties or other fees for such sales.3. Derivative worksThe license must permit modifications and derivative works and must permit their distribution under the same terms as the license for the original software.PSThree years ago, Petro Zaitsev analyzed the hidden problems of BSL-like licenses in detail in his article.Why is the MongoDB SSPL license dangerous to you?”. You can learn more about the reasons why companies are switching to BSL in our translation of an article from the CockroachDB team.Why is CockroachDB changing its Open Source license?”.
HashiCorp refused the Open Source license for its products
Yesterday, August 10, HashiCorp co-founder Armon Dadgar announced on the company’s official blog that they are transferring all their products from Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to a slightly redesigned one Business Source License v1.1. At the same time, Armon promised that “API, SDK and almost all libraries will remain under MPL 2.0. The changes have already affected such popular tools as Terraform, Nomad, Vaut, Vagrant, Packer. But here Consul also available under MPL.
The reason is quite typical for recent times: the company’s achievements are used for commercial purposes, the authors want to control the commercial use of their products, especially when competing services are built on their basis.
However, if the same MariaDB mentioned in the HashiCorp announcement uses BSL only in a limited set of components, keeping the core (that is, the MariaDB DBMS itself) an Open Source project, then HashiCorp translates its products to BSL completely:
There are vendors who benefit from the pure OSS model and community contributions to OSS projects, without providing material contributions back to the community. We do not believe this is in keeping with the spirit of Open Source.
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Vendors that provide competing services based on our open source products will no longer be able to add future releases, fixes, or security updates to them.
As a reminder, the BSL license is not an Open Source license in the full sense of the word, because it contradicts the first and third criteria of the OSD definition, formulated by the Open Source Initiative:
1. Free distribution
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or freely transferring the software as a component of a software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license does not require royalties or other fees for such sales.
3. Derivative works
The license must permit modifications and derivative works and must permit their distribution under the same terms as the license for the original software.
PS
Three years ago, Petro Zaitsev analyzed the hidden problems of BSL-like licenses in detail in his article.Why is the MongoDB SSPL license dangerous to you?“. You can learn more about the reasons why companies are switching to BSL in our translation of an article from the CockroachDB team.Why is CockroachDB changing its Open Source license?“.
