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

[steveej]

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]

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]

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.

[cdunster]

The way that I read the license, Holochain is perfectly fine to use Nomad as we are only using it for internal testing, so we are as far away from being a competitor as possible as we are just a user. I also interpret from it that Holo would not be a competitor as the goal of the service that Holo wants to offer, as I understand, is a way for users to test their hApps on a distributed network that just so happens to use Nomad under the hood as opposed to a competitor that would be offering a way to distribute any Nomad jobs to a network of clients. However, I am definitely not a lawyer so this is not legal advice.
There is also the option that Holo just offers the tools and support for running Nomad but does not provide the infrastructure itself so that potential clients can setup their own Nomad infra and tie it into Wind Tunnel just like what Holochain will do therefore Holo becomes a provider of Holo Ports that can be used for whatever, including Nomad.