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by kj4ips 1038 days ago
With the CLA in place, it doesn't matter. All contributors already gave hashicorp a broad license for everything that they don't already own, so hashicorp has license to largely do whatever regardless of what license they use to offer it to others.
2 comments

The CLA was put in place in December of 2018 [1]. Presumably contributions made before that were under inbound=outbound terms [2], meaning the contributing author licensed their exclusive rights under MPL 2.0, which is a file-based copyleft license. (see the chart at [3]).

[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/introducing-a-cla

[2] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#Compatib...

Only the code in HashiCorp's own code is covered by the CLAs, not the code in the third-party dependencies it has. If said dependencies used copyleft licenses like (A)GPL instead of pushover licenses like MIT, that would have prevented what HashiCorp did.