Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941799/

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.