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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

The CNCF has made exceptions on their license policy before, specifically for MPL based software. It'll probably be easier for OpenTF to go through that process than to relicense (which is likely not even possible for anyone other than Hashicorp).

- https://github.com/cncf/foundation/tree/main/license-excepti...

- https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/license-excepti...

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Disclosure: I'm on the CNCF legal committee, which mainly makes recommendations to the CNCF board on things like exceptions to CNCF's fairly strict licensing policy.

This is correct, but I believe MPL has never been approved as a main project license for a CNCF project before, as opposed to a license of a third party dependency (the default rule is that such projects must be under the Apache License 2.0). FWIW I would not hesitate to support such a request for a policy exception.

In my personal opinion, there's no good reason to have a license policy at the CNCF, or any Linux Foundation directed fund, that makes using copyleft licenses so burdensome, especially when they are as "weak" as MPL 2.0 is.

I know that there are Reasons. I just don't think they are good ones.

I agree, though that probably would not shock you. :)

That's great to hear. We at Oxide are huge fans of the MPLv2 and it's our default license for everything; I think it's reasonable that the default expectation for CNCF is Apache 2.0, but would love for MPLv2 to also be considered a first-class license!

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