Hashicorp Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License v1.1 (BSL or BUSL) change

[bryantbiggs]

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Overview of the Issue

• Not a bug, more of seeking guidance. Do we know how the change in licensing will affect this project, and if so, what actions need to be taken?

https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license

[solutiongeek]

The licensing for Atlantis will remain unaffected by the changes.

[jamengual]

but would this change limit Atlantis development in any way? Luke and Mishra are Hashicorp employees, how that could affect future features in atlantis that are similar to TFC? @solutiongeek

[mattjamesaus]

How much of a guarantee on that do we get? Perhaps we're better to move this to a Discussion?

[kevcube]

https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#What-is-considered-a-competitive-offering

Based on Hashi's definition of a "competitive offering" I wouldn't expect Atlantis to be affected.

There is no commercial product in Atlantis and it is not provided as a hosted service.

[alex067]

I don't think there's much similarity in feature sets between Atlantis to TFC, but commenting to keep a close eye on this thread.

[GenPage]

The maintainer team has spoken with Luke and we can confirm that the Atlantis codebase is unaffected by the licensing change.

As stated in the blog post:

That is why today we are announcing that HashiCorp is changing its source code license from Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL, also known as BUSL) v1.1 on all future releases of HashiCorp products. HashiCorp APIs, SDKs, and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0.

The last sentence highlights the Atlantis library and APIs:

HashiCorp APIs, SDKs, and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0.

Atlantis is not considered a Hashicorp product nor do we offer a managed option. Atlantis codebase will remain MPL 2.0 as stated by @solutiongeek previously in this thread. If anything should change, the team will do its best to ensure the continuation of the project as humanly possible for our community.

IANAL, but it seems to me this really affects any commercial offering that utilizes the core Terraform product as part of its own. That is the main target of this change. That would include Atlantis since it uses Terraform under the hood. However, it does not matter since we do not plan to offer a managed solution. See: https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#What-are-the-usage-limitations-for-HashiCorp's-products-under-BSL

10. What are the usage limitations for HashiCorp’s products under BSL?
    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.