"Why don't you trust corporate FOSS? It's still FOSS, isn't it? Why are you being so difficult?"
Well, this aged well.
@joepie91 the harder it is to find developer-facing documentation from the homepage, the less FOSS it is
@joepie91 what does this entail?
@hecate It's a license that tries to *look* like an open-source license, but isn't actually one, and that's essentially designed to lock out competitors.
In other words, HashiCorp stuff is no longer open-source, and any contributions to their projects are now contributions towards HashiCorp's commercial advantage (ie. unpaid labour).
@joepie91 So, what I'm reading, is that if you want to resell HashiCorp products, you have to buy it from them first. Isn't that how every reselling happens everywhere in the world? What is so shocking about buying the stuff you sell afterwards?
@hecate Normal products aren't built on free labour from community contributors.
The idea of open-source is that everybody contributes to a common pool of work, that everybody works on *and everybody can use equally*.
Restricting the license like that means they are not holding up their end of the deal - they are still trying to benefit from the community contributions and the goodwill associated with open-source, but without actually giving back and doing their part of the job.
@joepie91 So, what's the end of the reasoning when AWS is offering these kind of services for much less without contributing back to the code base? It's not outrageous to say "Okay you've made good money from the software we're making, how abotu you contribute some of it back?", is it?
And it's not really affecting "the community", since "the community" is not a reseller that makes horrendous margin on the contributors' back.
@hecate AWS has never been anything but a strawman, a credible-sounding justification for what's ultimately an exclusive right to earn money from something.
AWS is not what the license prevents, and in the case of Hashicorp, wasn't even a relevant player as far as I know.
@hecate And to be completely honest, I don't have much interest in discussing this topic.
Many, many, *many* in-depth articles have already been written about how the justifications behind these licenses are bunk, and ultimately these discussions always land on the same thing: "why is it a problem that companies try to make money?"
And if that's the premise of a discussion, then I already know that there's no possible productive outcome from it.
@joepie91 No that's not my premise, and in any case it's better to see how the situation evolves with the years.
@hecate Like, I do not care about whether a company can make money. I do not care whether they need a business model. I do not care whether companies die. I absolutely do not give a singular shit. Not my problem.
What I care about is the public commons, and whether people and organizations contribute to it in good faith. Relicensing under the BSL means they're not, and that's where the discussion ends for me.
If they also want to run a commercial business while engaging in interactions with the public commons, it is *their* job to figure that out, not mine. I have no obligation whatsoever to figure out their business model for them.
@joepie91 (also let's be real, Hashicorp is its own major contributor, it's not like the Debian project)
@joepie91 what's new here?
@linus They've dialed up the shittiness since, basically
@joepie91 on the other side of things, even though they've decided to go their own way, they don't go hunting opentofu.
And although it's sad to see them effectively splitting the community without much reason, and although that is predictable — isn't it something that can be accounted for, without avoiding use of corpo-oss outright?
It of course would be a whole other story if they'd tried to do that retroactively to older versions — yet I think not even docker attempted that.
This is far from the first time this happens in a company with a supposedly good and FOSS-friendly reputation, and yet I still get indignant comments every time I reject corporate FOSS suggestions...