Regular user of Terraform and Vagrant here. Not trying to be a troll on the subject of open source. But this change has brought to the surface a couple of thoughts I've had about the whole open source thing for a while now.
I took the time to read the information about the license change on HashiCorp's website. Reading through the FAQ alleviated some of my concerns about the license change.
It seems the biggest change is that the new license will prohibit a competitor from taking, for example, Terraform, free of charge, and package that up and distribute it for a fee, in competition to HashiCorp's own Terraform offering (some of which I'm sure is in the form of paid support and similar).
A “competitive offering” is a product that is sold to third parties, including through paid support arrangements, that significantly overlaps the capabilities of a HashiCorp commercial product. For example, this definition would include hosting or embedding Terraform as part of a solution that is sold competitively against our commercial versions of Terraform. By contrast, products that are not sold or supported on a paid basis are always allowed under the HashiCorp BSL license because they are not considered competitive.
I'm all for open source. I've written some myself years ago. But I don't view open source as freeware. Say I create widgets that I give out for free. I also have a paid support plan that gives you support should something go wrong (businesses often like to have someone to hold to the fire if something goes wrong with a piece of equipment or software or whatever my widget turns out to be).
You can take my widget and do whatever you want with it. You modify it at your own risk. The worst that could happen is you break it and you simply come to me and get a new free widget and go on your way. You can even submit your mods back to me for consideration for inclusion in a future version of my widget.
What I would be less happy about is if someone took my free widget and turned around and started giving them away and selling their own support plans, of which I get no money from. I do want to make money off of my widgets and the paid support plans is part of that. But if someone else who I don't know and have no kind of relationship with starts taking my actual widgets and making money off of them without me being compensated in any way, why would I even make the widgets and give them out for free in the first place?
Those who are unhappy with my views can, of course, take my widget, "fork it" and start their own line of widgets that may or may not continue to share similarities with mine, and do their own thing. And in this case that is what someone has done. Its one of the things that open source allows. Its why we have many software products that are forks of others that have become mostly closed source.
I also read in the FAQ reference above is that code changes made by HashiCorp will eventually be made open source under the MPLv2. It could take up to 4 years (not disagreeing that is a long time in software development terms), which gives HashiCorp a leg up to capitalize on their own changes before the code is made open source. But HashiCorp does need to look after their own financials, as no one works for free.
BSL is an alternative to closed source or open source licensing models. Under BSL, the source code is publicly available. Non-production use of the code is always free, and the licensor can also make an Additional Use Grant allowing production use under specific restrictions. Source code is guaranteed to become open source at a certain point in time. On a specified Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of the code under the BSL, whichever comes first, the code automatically becomes available under the Change License. Our current Change License for HashiCorp projects is MPL 2.0.
Which is to say, maybe I'm completely missing the whole point here. I often hear people say that open source means free as in free. They can take something that someone else wrote and released under some open source license and turn around and profit off of the work without a thought about the copyright holder. The author probably wrote the software out of the kindness of his heart or something - maybe wanted to do something to make them feel good about themselves contributing something to society, and maybe doesn't care if someone else they don't know monetizes it without receiving any of it in return. Don't know many people who write code for free.
