46 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
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---
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layout: post
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title: Hashicorp's License Change and my Home Lab - Update
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date: 2023-08-17 18:15:00 Europe/Amsterdam
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categories: hashicorp terraform vault nomad
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---
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_See the [Update](#update) at the end of the article._
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Already a week ago, Hashicorp [announced](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license) it would change the license on almost all its projects.
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Unlike [their previous license](https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/ab411a1952f5b28e6c4bd73071194761da36a83f), which was the Mozilla Public License 2.0, their new license is no longer truly open source.
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It is called the Business Source License™ and restricts use of their software for competitors.
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In their own words:
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> 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.
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I found [a great article](https://meshedinsights.com/2021/02/02/rights-ratchet/) by MeshedInsights that names this behaviour the "rights ratchet model".
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They define a script start-ups use to garner the interest of open source enthusiasts but eventually turn their back on them for profit.
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The reason why Hashicorp can do this, is because contributors signed a copyright license agreement (CLA).
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This agreement transfers the copyright of contributors' code to Hashicorp, allowing them to change the license if they want to.
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I find this action really regrettable because I like their products.
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This sort of action was also why I wanted to avoid using an Elastic stack, which also had their [license changed](https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing).[^elastic]
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These companies do not respect their contributors and the software stack beneath they built their product on, which is actually open source (Golang, Linux, etc.).
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# Impact on my Home Lab
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I am using Terraform in my home lab to manage several important things:
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- Libvirt virtual machines
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- PowerDNS records
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- Elasticsearch configuration
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With Hashicorp's anti open source move, I intend to move away from Terraform in the future.
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While I will not use Hashicorp's products for new personal projects, I will leave my current setup as-is for some time because there is no real need to quickly migrate.
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I might also investigate some of Terraform's competitors, like Pulumi.
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Hopefully there is a project that respects open source which I can use in the future.
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# Update
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A promising fork of Terraform has been announced called [OpenTF](https://opentf.org/announcement).
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They intend to take part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which I think is a good effort because Terraform is so important for modern cloud infrastructures.
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# Footnotes
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[^elastic]: While I am still using Elasticsearch, I don't use the rest of the Elastic stack in order to prevent a vendor lock-in.
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