HashiCorp drops open source for 'source available'

Company joins MongoDB, Elastic, Confluent and others saying 'you can't compete directly with us'

HashiCorp, the maker of widely used software development and deployment tools including Vagrant and Terraform, has announced that it is moving away from the open source model with which it made its name.

In a blog post, Arman Dadgar, who cofounded the San Francisco-based company in 2021 with Mitchell Hashimoto, said the company is moving to "the Business Source Licence to ensure continued investment in its community and to continue providing open, freely available products."

Dadgar said the company was founded on a belief in the open source model for its ability to build ecosystems and communities around products, for users to be able to modify the code for their purposes, and for reasons of transparency.

However, he went on, there are vendors that "take advantage of pure OSS models, and the community work on OSS projects, for their own commercial goals, without providing material contributions back."

As a result, he added, "we believe commercial open source models need to evolve for the ecosystem to continue providing open, freely available software."

As of 10th August, HashiCorp source code licencing has changed from the Mozilla Public Licence v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source Licence (BSL, also known as BUSL) v1.1 for all future releases of HashiCorp products. However, HashiCorp APIs, SDKs and "almost all other libraries" will remain under MPL 2.0.

HashiCorp's move mirrors those of other formerly open source companies including MongoDB, Redis Labs and Elastic, which also complained that their work was being exploited, particularly by the cloud giants who they accused of creating their own versions of the software and favouring it in their marketplaces while contributing little in return.

Like those companies, Hashicorp says it wants more control over how the software is commercialised, while keeping it free to use for most end users.

"BSL 1.1 is a source-available licence that allows copying, modification, redistribution, non-commercial use, and commercial use under specific conditions. With this change we are following a path similar to other companies in recent years," Dadgar wrote.

BSL 1.1 is also used by the likes of Couchbase and Cockroach labs to control the commercialisation of their code, but HashiCorp will add some tweaks to "include additional usage grants that allow for broadly permissive use of our source code," said Dadgar.

End-users will still be able to copy, modify and redistribute the code "except where providing a competitive offering to HashiCorp", and Hashicoprp partners will be able to build integrations as before. However, vendors who provide competitive services will no longer be able to incorporate releases, bug fixes or security updates contributed to the community products.

As might be expected, the response to the announcement has been mixed.

Many on social media saw it as hypocritical and out of line with HashiCorp's claims of continued commitment to open source.

Some were angered that, as they see it, HashiCorp has benefited over the years from the work of community contributors and is now pulling up the drawbridge, with none of that ownership accruing to the contributors.

And there were accusations of 'open washing' and bait-and-switch from open source.

Others wondered why the company had not adopted the existing BSL v1.1 licence as-is, instead adding its own tweaks, with the risk of fragmenting the landscape further, to the possible detriment of customers.

However, Avi Press, CEO at open source analytics tools company Scarf was sympathetic:

"HashiCorp has set a good bar for how to do a BSL switch smoothly. No misnaming anything, no attacks, just a difficult business decision carefully communicated. They are a well-meaning group of people who have shown they do care about OSS, whether or not you like their decision," he said on Twitter/X.

Nevertheless, he did express some concern about the Balkanisation of the licencing landscape.

"I think an important problem for us to solve is how to best standardise the 'You can do anything except compete directly with us' kind of licence. Different BSL flavours are all basically trying to achieve this but there are still a myriad of ways that big co's choose to do this."

Open washing

Amanda Brock, CEO of not-for-profit open technology advocacy group OpenUK was more critical, wondering whether a recent leadership change, which saw co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto step aside from the leadership in 2021 as the company went public, might have something to do with the decision.

"Taking it to an IPO and seeing Mitchell have the apparent wisdom to step aside and allow a more experienced individual to run HashiCorp all made sense, but has that also led to its downfall as an open source company? The statements about BUSL are sadly open washing," she said.

See also: Open source: supporting a different form of capitalism

"It would be wrong to suggest these two ever intended a ‘bait and switch' but they have indeed switched away from open source. The pressure of enabling their competitors with their innovations - an inevitability of open source - did not align with the need to generate shareholder value.

"There's almost a bigger question here - how much money is enough? Is a lot of money with others generating a lot of money too a reason to stop? We're left wondering whether had Mitchell remained CEO, would this have occurred?"

In its latest quarterly figures from June, HashiCorp reported total revenues of $138 million, representing an increase of 37% year-over-year. 830 out of a total of 4,392 paying customers provided annual recurring revenues of $100,000 or more.

To me this is another sign of the move that is taking place around the continued polarization of Open Source. We can see where ‘foundation' based Open Source projects like Kubernetes or PostgreSQL are focused on the benefits of and for the community, hence they keep using approved Open Source Licenses. On the other side, Commercial Open Source companies, both venture-funded and public-listed, continue to show their "commitment" to Open Source as being no more than a marketing ploy to efficiently attract users and customers at early stages.

Polarisation of open source

Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of database as a service firm Percona, described the move as "hostile towards the community who supported the company along the way", and part of the "continued polarisation of open source."

He continued: "We can see where ‘foundation' based open source projects like Kubernetes or PostgreSQL are focused on the benefits of and for the community, hence they keep using approved open Source licences. On the other side, commercial open source companies, both venture-funded and public-listed, continue to show their 'commitment' to open source as being no more than a marketing ploy to efficiently attract users and customers at early stages."

This article was amended to add Peter Zaitsev's comments.