Closure: Is Open-Source Licensing Suddenly Unsustainable?

HashiCorp’s recent move to bring Terraform under a more restricted-use license may not be the last from companies seeking greater control of the markets their products generate.

Painting: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner, from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.

You can't really make a mark in the data center infrastructure software industry today without developing your product in an #opensource environment. That's really the way it is; come to the market with a commercial license agreement, and you'll be perceived as trying to finagle a vendor lock-in agreement with customers.

You can't really grow from being a startup to being, as I've heard it called from more than one source over the years, a "real company" until the product you produce or the service you offer has a discrete, accountable asset value. With financial advisors and underwriters equating "open source" with "free" in their minds, that's hard to accomplish. At some point, a company capable of standing on its own without more funding rounds, must have its own strategy for asserting value. And many companies say, the ecosystem that organically formed around their products, is where the most value originates from the asset.

Which sounds nice. Even inspiring. But what happens when a company executes a strategy that involves replacing its open source licenses for commercial licenses -- as HashiCorp, MariaDB, Redis, and many others have done -- in order to assert value for existing or future shareholders, only for the people comprising the ecosystem to take their market with them elsewhere, centering it around an open-source fork of the original product? There appear to be ethical grey areas on both sides.

For The New Stack, I explore all of these grey areas with world-class experts Richard Fontana (the co-author of GPLv3) and Prof. Clark Asay of BYU Law School.

“We’ve put off the discussion for perhaps too long:  To whom does open-source software truly belong?  Legally speaking, it’s the intellectual property of its original creator.  Any rights the software development community may have to that software are granted by that creator, by way of the software’s license.  Does such a grant stop the creator from ever claiming an exclusive right to the idea behind the software?  Perhaps more importantly, does it preclude that creator from exclusive ownership of the market that naturally forms around the use and exploitation of that software?”