I guess you can chalk that up to naivety on my part. I've always assumed there is a social contract on top of the CLA I probably signed, that the software I wrote would continue to be available and maintained via contributions from both the company and community. And since they very obviously benefit from a plethora of OSS themselves, including the language they've used to build their products and the platforms they undoubtedly run on.
I guess I'm always free to fork the codebase I care about under its current license and try to build a community around that. But I think we all know that's not as viable.
Anyway, I'll just be reconsidering my use of software open sourced by companies, I guess, regardless of how permissively it's licensed. The free lunches I thought we collectively agreed were awesome and ought to keep helping each other provide, are apparently ending as money gets tight.
Just because they have the legal right doesn't make it ethical, and even if someone makes the argument that it is ethical that doesn't change that it's a bit of a slap in the face to the open source community. You're allowed to be annoyed by this.
So, I don't understand -- had you known that this license change to prevent competitor use of their product, would you not have bothered to add the functionality you contributed?
No idea. I contributed 8ish years ago when vault was a significantly smaller project (it was 9mo old at the time) and IIRC there was nothing like hosted hashicorp back then. I just wanted to put into vault a CA keypair I used easyrsa to generate and that didn't work without a good deal more crypto plumbing, and I tried to make it a bit more futureproof while I was there. I had no real idea that 8 years down the road I would be tired of corpo life and tired of having to fight to contribute to OSS and might want to earn money in that sphere.
Today, absolutely. I would simply choose another piece of software to build on and contribute to. Or build my own if I thought something open enough and good enough didn't exist yet.
I guess I'm always free to fork the codebase I care about under its current license and try to build a community around that. But I think we all know that's not as viable.
Anyway, I'll just be reconsidering my use of software open sourced by companies, I guess, regardless of how permissively it's licensed. The free lunches I thought we collectively agreed were awesome and ought to keep helping each other provide, are apparently ending as money gets tight.