holochain / holochain-infra

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investigate nomad's BSL before going all-in on it #83

Open steveej opened 4 months ago

steveej commented 4 months ago

the workload orchestrator efforts in this repo have been built on top of nomad.

before building out this layer and making it available to the developer teams at Holochain and Holo, i want to inquire how much the license that has been adopted by the project introduces friction or prevention of certain use-cases in our context.

evangineer commented 4 months ago

My bolding:

The Licensor hereby grants you the right to copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and make non-production use of the Licensed Work. The Licensor may make an Additional Use Grant, above, permitting limited production use.

Additional Use Grant: You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided Your use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in order to compete with HashiCorp’s paid version(s) of the Licensed Work.

https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl

evangineer commented 4 months ago

In a formal sense, this is an unfree license given the restriction in terms of use.

The practical impact is a cognitive and legal load in terms of evaluating whether our use is out of scope with the above licensing conditions.

For me, this is a showstopper in the context of the Holo Platform infrastructure, as it would impair the agility and slows down the velocity of Holo with regards to use in Holo infrastructure, due to additional cycles of considering licensing issues over and above practical implementatin issues.

That's clearly not the case for Holochain per se, but there is a potential grey area since the Holo Platform does have some dependency on Holochain Infrastructure.