Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
Online > Online Breaking News Coverage > New England

Title of entry: 
HashiCorp Terraform open source license change

Issue or Publication date:
08/11/2023; 08/14/2023; 09/20/2023; 10/11/2023

Publication name: 
TechTarget ITOperations

Publishing/parent company: 
Techtarget

View Website home page:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations

Description of the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

HashiCorp, maker of popular IT automation software, shocked the tech industry when it revealed on August 10 that it would shift from an open source license to a business source license for all future releases of its products. This move created controversy between those who saw HashiCorp perpetrating a “bait and switch” -- gaining popularity via free and open source licensing, then shifting to a proprietary model to cash in -- and those who expressed sympathy for the practical pressures open source software vendors face to grow revenues based on free products, particularly when these products can also be marketed by direct competitors.
SearchITOperations covered the initial announcement in a timely manner that included initial reactions from users of HashiCorp’s community edition software (story 1). This was followed by a deeper analysis on the next business day, which linked the news to deeper longstanding tensions in the industry between the open source ethos and vendor business concerns (story 2).
This publication was among the first to follow up when a consortium of companies affected by the HashiCorp license changes to its Terraform infrastructure-as-code product banded together in September to create their own version of the software under an open source license. Ultimately, that project was admitted as an incubating project under The Linux Foundation, for eventual submission to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation -- a major rebuke to HashiCorp, which is a CNCF member. This publication was also among the first to cover this development (story 3), and the only outlet to include analysis and reaction from a member of the HashiCorp Ambassador end user program.
Finally, during HashiCorp’s HashiConf annual conference in October, SearchITOperations was the only publication to report that HashiCorp had quietly changed the terms of service for its Terraform Registry, creating an obstacle for the Linux Foundation project and deepening the controversy around HashiCorp’s practices (story 4). In this same story, it was the first publication to include a direct comment from a HashiCorp executive about the licensing change fallout – other than its initial license change announcement, the company had remained silent.
Overall, these stories were among a total of seven articles published on the site about the licensing change and subsequent controversy.

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Please enter a URL that will direct judges to the entry: 
https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366548016/HashiCorp-open-source-change-targets-competitors
Additional URLs, if needed:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366548272/Confusion-mounts-amid-HashiCorp-open-source-change
https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366552676/Linux-Foundation-ups-ante-on-HashiCorp-hosts-Terraform-fork
https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366555192/Terraform-Registry-TOS-change-stokes-open-source-ire

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