DEVOPSdigest

HashiCorp changed its source code license from Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License v1.1 (BSL or BUSL), effective in all future releases of HashiCorp products, including HashiCorp Terraform, Vault, Consul, Boundary, Nomad, Waypoint, Packer, and Vagrant.

This change will enable HashiCorp to continue allowing permissive use of the HashiCorp products for the HashiCorp community and partner ecosystems while having more control around how its intellectual property is commercialized.

“The BSL allows HashiCorp to continue building open, freely available products while providing more control over how our products are commercialized,” said Armon Dadgar, co-founder and chief technology officer, HashiCorp. “We provide feature-rich products to the community for free, and that is made possible by our commercial customers who partner with us. We have a thriving community of users, partners, and customers, many of whom are contributors, and our first goal was to minimize impact to them.”

This new license allows for all forms of use except for providing a competitive offering to HashiCorp products and services. The new license does not change how customers, users, and partners will interact with HashiCorp code. Specifically:

- HashiCorp will continue to publish all source code and all updates to HashiCorp products to its GitHub repository.

- This source code will be available for free, and users will be allowed to copy, modify, and redistribute the code for all non-commercial use and commercial use without a competitive offering.

- Partners who have built non-competitive integrations or custom tools will still be able to use and maintain these tools.

Vendors who provide competitive products and services built on HashiCorp open source products will no longer be able to incorporate future releases, bug fixes, or security patches contributed to HashiCorp products.

HashiCorp works closely with the major cloud service providers, and hundreds of technology partners and system integrators to support joint integrations for mutual users and customers. The updated HashiCorp license will continue to support this strong partner network, and does not change the ability for partners to build joint integrations for mutual customers. HashiCorp APIs, SDKs, and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0.