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relicensing?
\item \textbf{Taxonomy of BUSL Additional Use Grants.}
The BUSL default is to prohibit production use, but most adopters
of BUSL have used AUG clauses that grant permission for production
use that doesn't compete commercially with the software
developers' own business, or concretely that doesn't involve
charging for access to a hosted instance of the software.
How similar are the different formulations of this notion? Are
there any other permissions that appear in practice in BUSL AUG
clauses beyond the notion of not competing with services run by or
licensed by the upstream developer? Is there a significant
minority of BUSL adopters that aim to restrict (and sell licenses
for) ``production'' use more generally?
\item \textbf{Relicensing after initial Open Source publication.}
Is it a conscious strategy --- or at least a conspicuous option
--- to start out a new project under a purely Open Source license
in order to garner interest and mindshare, and then subsequently
relicense under a DOSP license? Some of HashiCorp's critics noted
that the company had given adopters incentives to become expert
in, or otherwise reliant upon, the company's software while it was
under an Open Source license, and then tried to benefit from that
familiarity and adoption by changing the license terms in the
future.
If some of the most popular DOSP-relicensed projects had started
out under DOSP rather than Open Source terms from the outset,
would they have attracted the same level of interest and adoption?
\item \textbf{Why has a fork of Terraform attracted so many
contributions and so much interest compared to forks of other
projects?} % TODO: See ref:091db178 -- maybe this question
% should be recast.
It's too early to say whether the OpenTofu project will broadly
outcompete Terraform among various audiences, but it's clear that
this fork started off with a bang, immediately garnering
substantial interest, sponsorships and financial commitments, and
endorsements from various companies and developers. However, Open
Source forks of other HashiCorp projects are comparatively
stagnant and underpublicized. Similarly, other BUSL relicensing
events did not seem to result in highly active forks (although
some may have increased interest in existing Open Source
competitors to the relicensed projects).
What's special about the OpenTofu effort, or about Terraform or
its community, that could account for these differences? Did
Terraform's market share in its niche play a large role? Was
Terraform particularly indispensable for its users in comparison
to some other relicensed projects?
\numberedsection{Acknowledgements}\label{acknowledgements-sow}
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The authors are grateful to the Open Source Initiative for giving us
the opportunity to explore this topic and to make, we hope, a small
contribution to the future health of Open Source by analyzing industry
trends likely to affect it.
Many people responded to our call for examples. They always
accompanied their submissions with historical context, and often with
thoughtful analysis as well. We thank them all sincerely; this report
would not have been possible without their help. We list them here in
no particular order (in fact, in mechanically randomized order):
Matija Šuklje,
AntiCompositeNumber [sic],
Simon Phipps,
Damiano Verzulli,
Josh Berkus,
Marcin Koziej,
Alex Scammon,
Thomas Sandmann,
Royce Williams,
Ross Mounce,
Nick Vidal,
Stuart D. Gathman,
Mark Chapman,
Samuel Tardieu,
Chad Whitacre,
Johann Schöpfer,
Abby Kearns,
André Wolski,
Heather Meeker,
Neil Carpenter,
Sam Ramji,
Anthony Nowocien,
Stefano Maffulli,
and Jesse Bickel.
The authors are solely responsible for the contents of this report,
including but not limited to any errors.
% Two examples learned from https://blog.adamretter.org.uk/business-source-license-adoption/