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"All non-production uses are permitted. All production uses are allowed other than hosting or embedding the software in an offering competitive with HashiCorp products or services."

Use of Terraform in Kubernetes testing infrastructure is certainly production use.

And: Hashicorp produces Nomad, which is a competitor to Kubernetes.

I think you can add this up, can't you?

@fuzzychef I think the key part is "an offering competitive with #HashiCorp products or services" and is addressed in point 6 of the FAQ:

"6. Who is impacted by this change?
Organizations providing competitive offerings to HashiCorp will no longer be permitted to use the community edition products free of charge under our BSL license."

https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#Who-is-impacted-by-this-change

End users, be it personal or commercial for internal use, are allowed to use #Hashi products under the #BSL.

https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#Who-is-impacted-by-this-change

@mcepl @fuzzychef Hold your horses. It’s as easy as reaching out to Hashicorp to get in writing what is your organisation use case and decide if you want to pay or not.

I’m not a lawyer and obviously my previous message was not any kind of legal advice.

Your aggressive reply is completely out of place in a civil discussion.

@itorres @fuzzychef I didn’t want to be aggressive (and I am sorry @fuzzychef if I was) but to show how incredibly damaging and awful such jerk action as withdrawing commonly used program from FLOSS universe is.

@mcepl @fuzzychef

thank you. AFAIK they cannot re-license the past so it would be possible to continue using the Hashicorp versions prior to adoption of the BSL while migrating to an alternative or even fork if there is a community willing to continue development in an OSS fashion.

And I completely agree with you. Hashicorp's change of license is, in the words of @bcantrill, "shitting in the pool of Open Source and disgusting corporate behaviour".*

* https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2518

@itorres maybe @bcantrill can comment on the difficulties for a smaller company with an open source product that giant corporations want to use for free

@vy @itorres That's called "lead gen" -- and it should be a terrific pipeline for a company and its goods and services!

@bcantrill @itorres that was not my experience - and not many people's experience. Converting those leads to sales requires making miracles.

@vy @itorres Well, no one said it was easy. If you want, try a strictly proprietary route -- which you will almost assuredly find even more difficult.

@bcantrill @itorres I did not find it more difficult, but that's just one anecdote. On a general principle, it is hard to get big companies and consumers to pay for software ever, but when they have the alternative of just downloading, it becomes much harder.

@vy @itorres @mcepl @bcantrill Yes, like the hundreds of projects that Hashicorp uses and depends on for free, maintained by others.

And I'm not angry, I'm just sad. Hashi was a beacon of hope. Now they're just Yes Another Also-ran Software Company.

Expect an acquisition in the near future.

@fuzzychef @itorres @mcepl @bcantrill I'm sympathetic, but but Hashicorp took hundreds of millions in VC investment and went public at a ridiculously high value. It is losing big money every quarter - it does not have a sustainable business with free software. And its investors want to believe its customers won't Amazon them. What do you expect?