HashiCorp, Terraform, and OpenTF

HashiCorp, Terraform, and OpenTF

Posted Aug 23, 2023 20:04 UTC (Wed) by fw (subscriber, #26023)
Parent article: HashiCorp, Terraform, and OpenTF

For true charity organizations (e.g. US 501(c)(3) organizations), such as the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or Python Software Foundation (PSF), the "public benefit" nature of their charters would likely make it impossible to change their code to a non-FOSS license.

I don't think this is accurate. I do not think there's any legal requirement that software that is provided for public benefit needs to be licensed under an OSI-compatible license (or any similar criteria), or that such organizations align with the free culture movement more generally. For example, IEEE is a 501(c)(3) organization (according to Wikipedia), and yet they are against free dissemination of knowledge, and their policies makes it hard to use much of their output for open-source development.

What's different for for the FSF and the PSF is that their agreements enable relicensing, but deliberately incorporate some constraints on future licenses.

The PSF CLA can be viewed here. The future licensing constraint is in the CLA proper instead of a semi-unrelated preamble, so I expect that it's much effective. The FSF copyright assignment is similar, but I don't think the text is publicly available.

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