HashiCorp Switches to Source-Available License

HashiCorp, the company behind Vagrant, Terraform, and other tools, has dropped the open source Mozilla Public License v2.0 in favor of the source-available Business Source License (BSL) v1.1, reports Liam Proven.

The BSL 1.1 grants “the right to copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and make non-production use of the Licensed Work.” This means "you 'may be' granted the right to use the code in production provided you don't compete with HashiCorp," Proven explains.

In the announcement, HashiCorp is quick to mention other companies with similar restrictions:

With this change we are following a path similar to other companies in recent years. These companies include Couchbase, Cockroach Labs, Sentry, and MariaDB, which developed this license in 2013. Companies including Confluent, MongoDB, Elastic, Redis Labs, and others have also adopted alternative licenses that include restrictions on commercial usage. 

You can still get the source code, with caveats, but “it's not technically FOSS anymore,” Proven says.

Read more at The Register.

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