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Commit ebf2eb4b authored by Seth Schoen's avatar Seth Schoen
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Talk about reactions to Terraform relicensing + OpenTofu

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......@@ -292,23 +292,50 @@ This is echoed in statements by several BUSL adopters that they sought a way to
\subsection{Consequences/Impacts?}
% Some people forked the last open source version of Terraform and are
% actively maintaining it as OpenTofu. I don't know that people have done
% this for other BUSL-relicensed projects.
Projects that change from an open-source license to a delayed open-source
license have attracted criticism, with some people pledging to
switch to other projects or even to maintain competitive forks of the
prior open-source versions. The most consequential such effort
appears to be OpenTofu, a fork of HashiCorp's Terraform announced soon
after Terraform was relicensed under BUSL.\footnote{See
\otsurl{https://opentofu.org/}.}
OpenTofu has announced several corporate sponsorships, apparently plans
to hire multiple full-time developers, and has organized itself as a
project of the Linux Foundation. The fork's creators complained that
the prior open source license of Terraform had encouraged people to
develop professional expertise with the software and to use it as a part
of their infrastructure.
% One could say much more about this both in terms of commercial strategy
% and also in terms of users' subjective feelings of betrayal.
They also noted concerns about whether Terraform users could be confident
about whether their individual uses were considered commercially
competitive with HashiCorp.
Most other forks of recently-relicensed software have not attracted the
same levels of attention, participation, or adoption.
% yes for Vagrant -> Viagrunt, although OpenTofu got vastly more support
% and activity
% It's potentially much harder for projects under non-open-source terms to
% accept outside contributions, both because people may be less motivated
% to make them and because the licensing status is more confusing. However
% HashiCorp for example has a CLA, with a bot that checks whether authors
% of pull requests have signed it. HashiCorp does continue to receive some
% outside contributions on BUSL-licensed projects.
It could be harder for projects under non-open-source terms to receive
or accept outside contributions, both because people may be less motivated
to make them and because the licensing status of the resulting contributions
is more complicated. However, some projects that have switched to BUSL (or
other licenses) continue to accept outside contributions subject to a
contributor license agreement (``CLA"), which grants certain rights to the
original developer. HashiCorp, for example, has a CLA for its
projects\footnote{See, for example,
\otsurl{https://cla.hashicorp.com/hashicorp/terraform}.}, and a bot that
that checks whether the authors of pull requests have signed it, so that
their contributions will not be incorporated into the codebase until
and unless they do so. The company does continue to receive some outside
code contributions to its BUSL-licensed projects, including Terraform.
% TODO: Has the rate measurably decreased?
%
% e.g. https://cla.hashicorp.com/hashicorp/terraform
% TODO: Did they have this requirement before relicensing? Some open source
% projects do have comparable CLAs for outside contributions to
% become part of their official upstream code bases.
% become part of their official upstream code bases. It's not only a
% BUSL/DOSP/proprietary licensing phenomenon.
\subsection{Other}
......@@ -407,7 +434,7 @@ for example, the presentation at
% TODO: Get rid of the {} that shows up in the link target
Since both the start and end-state licenses of the BOSL are themselves
open source, we do not regard the BOSL as a form of delayed open source
open source, we do not regard the BOSL as a form of delayed open-source
publication as defined by this report. Rather, it seems to be an
unconventional form of open source publication with time-varying open
source terms. While the BOSL has not been approved by the Open Source
......@@ -476,7 +503,7 @@ there was usually no public commitment to do so on any particular
schedule or under any particular circumstances. This practice is thus not
a core example of DOSP.
A ``delayed open-access" model, applied to research articles, has become
A ``delayed open access" model, applied to research articles, has become
popular for academic journals as a compromise between more restrictive
journal licensing and open-access publishing.\footnote{See
\otsurl{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed\_open-access\_journal}.}
......
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