224: The Cloud Pod Adopts the BS License

The Cloud Pod

Welcome to episode 224 of The CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, your hosts Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan discuss some major changes at Terraform, including switching from open source to a BSL License. Additionally, we cover updates to Amazon S3, goodies from Storage Day, and Google Gemini vs. Open AI.

Titles we almost went with this week:

None! This week’s title was chef’s kiss

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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Pre-Show

General News this Week:

00:41 AWS and HashiCorp announce Service Catalog support for Terraform Cloud

• AWS is catching up with GCP, with now native support for Terraform in Service Catalog.
• The new integration is expanding on the previous support for Open Source; they now support the Terraform Cloud service.
• This new feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Service Catalog is available.

02:07 HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

• Do you use tools like N0 or ScaleSet? Or perhaps some of the other Terraform-adjacent things? You **may** be in some trouble.
• Despite being ok with Amazon and GCP integrating their open source – and now Terraform cloud offering – Hashicorp is mad at companies adopting their technology and productizing it, forcing them to move to the new BSL (Business Source License) model.
• This covers all Hashicorp products, not just Terraform.
• HashiCorp points out that their approach has enabled them to partner closely with cloud providers to enable tight integrations for their joint users and customers, as well as hundreds of other technology partners.
• There are vendors who take advantage of pure OSS models, and the community work on OSS projects, for their own commercial goals, without providing material contributions back. (GASP!)
  • Hashi doesn’t think this is “the spirit of open source.”
• As a result, they believe commercial open source models need to change, as Open Source has reduced the barrier to copying innovation and selling it through existing distribution channels.
  • They point out they’re in good company; pointing to other OSS projects that have closed source or adopted similar BSL models.
• They are officially moving from the Mozilla Public License v2.0 to the BSL v1.1 on all future releases of HashiCorp products.
  • The APIs, SDKs and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0