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HashiCorp's license change
Thursday August 17, 2023. 12:34 AM , from LWN.net
Readers have been pointing us to HashiCorp's announcement
that it is moving to its own 'Business Source License' for some of its (formerly) open-source products. Like other companies (example) that have taken this path, HashiCorp is removing the freedom to use its products commercially in ways that it sees as competitive. This is, in a real sense, an old and tiresome story. The lessons to be drawn from this change are old as well. One is to beware of depending on any platform, free or proprietary, that is controlled by a single company. It is a rare company that will not try to take advantage of that control at some point. The other is to beware of contributor license agreements. HashiCorp's agreement used to read that it existed 'to ensure that our projects remain licensed under Free and Open Source licenses'; the current version doesn't say that anymore. But both versions give HashiCorp the right to play exactly this kind of game with any code contributed by outsiders. Developers who were contributing to a free-software project will now have their code used in a rather more proprietary setting. When a company is given the right to take somebody else's code proprietary, many of them will eventually make use of that right.
https://lwn.net/Articles/941799/
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