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Is this the end of open source?

Last Thursday, August 10, HashiCorp announced plans to move future releases of all its core products from a Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to a Business Source License v1.1 (BSL).

BSL 1.1 is a source-available license that allows copying, modification, redistribution, non-commercial use, and commercial use under specific conditions. HashiCorp’s implementation of the license allows end users to copy, modify, and redistribute the code for all non-commercial and commercial use except where providing a competitive offering to HashiCorp.

In a blog post explaining the change, Hashicorp’s co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar said: “With this change we are following a similar path to other companies in recent years. … Vendors who provide competitive services built on our community products will no longer be able to incorporate future releases, bug fixes, or security patches contributed to our products.”

In a video, Dadgar expressed that the new license was intended to push back against “a set of vendors who feel that they can take open source products and effectively commercialize them on their own without contributing anything back to the broader community.”

However, as of this newsletter’s publication, HashiCorp has not yet named the competitors the new license is targeting. This has caused a lot of confusion and debate about what the decision means for the future of open source. The OpenTF Manifesto is one initiative that has gained the support of many practitioners and businesses who want to keep Terraform “truly open source.”

What do you think of HashiCorp’s decision?I support it! ⭐Not a fan 👎Don’t care either way 🤷

See HashiCorp Licensing FAQ for more details.

Quick Bites

• Certo Mondo’s Amin Astaneh shared SRE lessons from Hyperscale on a recent episode of All Things Ops.
• Can you buy an Internal Developer Platform, or do you have to build one yourself? 🤔 This article provides a great explanation of why enterprise organizations need to build using a platform as a product approach.
• What’s the difference between a product engineer and a platform engineer?

• The folks at Atlassian shared a three-part framework they used to spark developer joy.
• Here’s a great guide to AWS tagging best practices.
• 6 patterns for platform engineering success, as taught by the speakers at PlatformCon 2023.

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And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

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