Well, that was awkward. In July I wrote about shifts in the open source licensing landscape, arguing, “It’s not that open source doesn’t matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed.” The furious backlash was sanctimonious and condemning. But, according to HashiCorp last week, it was also wrong.
For those who missed it, HashiCorp changed the license for its popular open source projects like Terraform and Vault to the Business Source License (BSL). The reason? To push back against “vendors who take advantage of pure [open source] models, and the community work on [open source] projects, for their own commercial goals, without providing material contributions back.” In other words, they needed to block free riders so that they could continue to invest in their products. As they conclude, such free riding isn’t “in the spirit of open source.”
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