---
layout: post
title:  Hashicorp's License Change and my Home Lab
date:   2023-08-17 18:15:00 Europe/Amsterdam
categories: hashicorp terraform vault nomad
---

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.
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.
It is called the Business Source License™ and restricts use of their software for competitors.
In their own words:
> 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.

I found [a great article](https://meshedinsights.com/2021/02/02/rights-ratchet/) by MeshedInsights that names this behaviour the "rights ratchet model".
They define a script start-ups use to garner the interest of open source enthusiasts but eventually turn their back on them for profit.
The reason why Hashicorp can do this, is because contributors signed a copyright license agreement (CLA).
This agreement transfers the copyright of contributors' code to Hashicorp, allowing them to change the license if they want to.

I find this action really regrettable because I like their products.
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]
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.).

# Impact on my Home Lab

I am using Terraform in my home lab to manage several important things:
- Libvirt virtual machines
- PowerDNS records
- Elasticsearch configuration

With Hashicorp's anti open source move, I intend to move away from Terraform in the future.
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.

I might also investigate some of Terraform's competitors, like Pulumi.
Hopefully there is a project that respects open source which I can use in the future.

# Footnotes

[^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.