In recent years, several high-profile open source companies have made headlines by shifting their licensing agreements away from purely open source models. MariaDB was first with its introduction of the Business Source License (BSL) in 2016 and was closely followed by MongoDB, Confluent, Redis Labs, and others. Now, HashiCorp is the latest company to follow this trend and announce its switch from an open source to a non-compete license.
Non-compete licenses mimic open source by allowing users to copy, modify, and redistribute code but only for specific purposes.