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Everything you need, all in one place. Contact sales Contact sales HashiCorp Licensing FAQ August 2023 1. What did HashiCorp announce today (Aug 10)? 2. Why is HashiCorp making this change? 3. What are the implications of this change for end users of HashiCorp's open source products? 4. What are the implications of this change for integration partners of HashiCorp? 5. What are the implications of this change for commercial customers of HashiCorp? 6. Who is impacted by this change? 7. What is considered a competitive offering? 8. What products will be covered by BSL 1.1 in their next release? 9. What is the Business Source License (BSL, or BUSL)? 10. What are the usage limitations for HashiCorp's products under BSL? 11. Why did HashiCorp select the BSL license? 12. What's the difference between the BSL and others such as AGPL, SSPL or the addition of Common Clause to agreements that HashiCorp could have chosen? 13. How does this impact the licensing of Terraform providers? 14. If I modify the source code of software licensed under the BSL, can I redistribute my modified version under another license? 15. Can I continue to use versions of the products that were provided under the original MPL 2.0 license? 16. Will HashiCorp backport security patches to previous releases under the MPL 2.0 license? 17. Does HashiCorp still believe in open source? 18. How does HashiCorp now refer to the freely available versions of products that were formerly known as open source (or OSS)? 19. I'm building (or have built) a product that embeds one or more HashiCorp products, and I'm concerned you may view it as competitive. How can I get clarity as to whether my product will violate the new BSL license. 20. Where can I learn more about this announcement or ask further questions? 1. What did HashiCorp announce today (Aug 10)? HashiCorp announced a transition from the Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL, or BUSL) v1.1 for future releases of all products and several libraries. HashiCorp APIs, SDKs, and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0. 2. Why is HashiCorp making this change? We strongly believe in the value of openly sharing source code and enabling practitioners to solve their problems, building communities, and creating transparency. HashiCorp provides feature-rich products to the community for free, and that development is made possible by our commercial customers who partner with us. By shifting to this license, HashiCorp can better manage commercial uses of our source code and continue to invest in our thriving community of practitioners, many of whom are contributors, in a manner that will not impede their work. 3. What are the implications of this change for end users of HashiCorp's open source products? For end users who are using HashiCorp's current open source products and new releases using the BSL license for their internal or personal usage, there is no change. 4. What are the implications of this change for integration partners of HashiCorp? For integration partners that are building integrations with our products, including Terraform providers, Vault plugins, and other product integrations, there is no change. 5. What are the implications of this change for commercial customers of HashiCorp? For commercial customers of HashiCorp there is no change. Those customers get our technology under separately negotiated licenses. 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. Commercial licensing terms are available and can enable use cases beyond the BSL limitations. If you are building a solution that integrates with HashiCorp products and want to talk with us, email licensing@hashicorp.com. 7. What is considered a competitive offering? HashiCorp considers a competitive offering to be a product or service provided to users or customers outside of your organization that has significant overlap with the capabilities of HashiCorp's commercial products or services. For example, this definition would include providing a HashiCorp tool as a hosted service or embedding HashiCorp products in a solution that is sold competitively against our offerings. If you need further clarification with respect to a particular use case, you can email licensing@hashicorp.com. Custom licensing terms are also available to provide more clarity and enable use cases beyond the BSL limitations. 8. What products will be covered by BSL 1.1 in their next release? The products using the BSL license from here forward are HashiCorp Terraform, Packer, Vault, Boundary, Consul, Nomad, Waypoint, and Vagrant. The latest releases under MPL are Terraform 1.5.5, Packer 1.9.2, Vault 1.14.1, Boundary 0.13.1, Consul 1.16.1, Nomad 1.6.1, Waypoint 0.11.4, and Vagrant 2.3.7, which is MIT licensed. Security fixes will be backported under MPL 2.0 through December 31, 2023. 9. What is the Business Source License (BSL, or BUSL)? BSL is an alternative to closed source or open source licensing models. Under BSL, the source code is publicly available. Non-production use of the code is always free, and the licensor can also make an Additional Use Grant allowing production use under specific restrictions. Source code is guaranteed to become open source at a certain point in time. On a specified Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of the code under the BSL, whichever comes first, the code automatically becomes available under the Change License. Our current Change License for HashiCorp projects is MPL 2.0. 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. 11. Why did HashiCorp select the BSL license? BSL 1.1 is a source-available license that allows copying, modification, redistribution, non-commercial use, and commercial use under certain conditions. BSL allows our community to use our source code for virtually all purposes, while preventing commercially competitive use of our source code. 12. What's the difference between the BSL and others such as AGPL, SSPL or the addition of Common Clause to agreements that HashiCorp could have chosen? The BSL is a highly permissive license. It allows users to copy, modify, and redistribute the code under a broad range of conditions. Other licenses such as AGPL or SSPL impose copyleft requirements and can be much more burdensome. The BSL is also a time-limited license that converts to an open source license (for us, Mozilla Public License v2.0) after a period of time (for us, 4 years). HashiCorp believes our approach strikes the best balance between making our source code broadly available and supporting the developer community with minimal limitations while protecting our ability to continue investing in feature-rich, free-of-charge software. 13. How does this impact the licensing of Terraform providers? There are thousands of Terraform providers in the ecosystem, created by many different organizations. The maintainers of each provider are free to select their own license. The providers built and maintained by HashiCorp remain Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0), as do the SDKs and Frameworks that HashiCorp provides to plugin and provider authors. 14. If I modify the source code of software licensed under the BSL, can I redistribute my modified version under another license? No. Your modified version consists of the original software (which is under the BSL) and your modifications, which together constitute a derivative work of the original software. The license does not grant you the right to redistribute under another license. 15. Can I continue to use versions of the products that were provided under the original MPL 2.0 license? Yes. The license change is not retroactive. This means all source code and releases prior to the change remain under the MPL 2.0 license. You may continue to use those versions indefinitely under the original license. 16. Will HashiCorp backport security patches to previous releases under the MPL 2.0 license? HashiCorp will continue to backport critical security patches, as available, to existing versions under the MPL 2.0 license until December 31, 2023. Any patches after that date will be provided under the new license. 17. Does HashiCorp still believe in open source? Yes. HashiCorp is a proponent of open source philosophy and maintains a large number of open source projects. HashiCorp was founded as an open source company, with all the core products and libraries released as open source. The community ethos has focused on enabling practitioners, building an ecosystem around the products, and creating transparency by making source code available. HashiCorp is still dedicated to its original ethos. The licensing change impacts the core products, which have source available and a broadly permissive license. HashiCorp additionally publishes and maintains hundreds of other open source libraries, frameworks, and SDKs. 18. How does HashiCorp now refer to the freely available versions of products that were formerly known as open source (or OSS)? We have referred to versions of our products as either open source (OSS), Enterprise, or Cloud. Going forward, we will refer to the open, freely available versions as "community". There are many references to open source on our websites and we will work to clarify that language change in the coming weeks. 19. I'm building (or have built) a product that embeds one or more HashiCorp products, and I'm concerned you may view it as competitive. How can I get clarity as to whether my product will violate the new BSL license. Please reach out to us. We are happy to speak with you. The best way to begin the conversation is at licensing@hashicorp.com. We can provide timely feedback to your questions and discuss constructive solutions, including potential exemptions and/or partnership arrangements. 20. Where can I learn more about this announcement or ask further questions? - The press release is located here. - The blog post is located here. - For the online discussion forum, visit our Discourse here. - For any media questions, please contact media@hashicorp.com - For questions about licensing and clarifications on usage restrictions, please contact licensing@hashicorp.com. Sign up for the HashiCorp Newsletter Email*[ ] [ ]Send me news about HashiCorp products, releases and events. 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