HashiCorp license change
HashiCorp just changed the license of its software to the Business Source License 1.1 (SPDX identifier BUSL-1.1) [1][2][3]. This change affects:
- community/terraform
- community/packer
- community/vault
- community/consul
- community/nomad
As a not-yet-member of the-not-yet-official license team, I would like to try to clarify the new license a bit:
The new license is not open source.
On the SPDX license page [4], the notes clearly states:
The Business Source License [...] is not an Open Source license.
This sentence also appears on the MariaDB page of the license [5], who created it in the first place.
Fedora gives further evidence, as this license is in the list of Not-Allowed Licenses [6].
The Licensor hereby grants you the right to copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and make non-production use of the Licensed Work.
The word that makes this license not opensource is non-production, which violates point 6 of the OSD [7] as well as the proposed Alpine license policy [8] "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". Production is a part of a Field of Endeavor, often a business.
In conclusion, I don't think we can allow the new versions of HashiCorps software in aports. I would suggest to not update these packages as long as no one complains, since the current versions are still open source. When the demand gets high we could switch to forks which are still active and look like they might be further maintained.
[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license
[2] https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq
[3] https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl
[4] https://spdx.org/licenses/BUSL-1.1.html
[5] https://mariadb.com/bsl11/
[6] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/not-allowed-licenses/
[7] https://opensource.org/osd/
[8] https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/lmarz/license-policy/-/blob/main/policy.md