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OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

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Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#21

Post by robertlagrant »

alephnerd wrote: post #9

I know most HN commentators are thinking about Terraform, but I think this change was done with Consul and Vault in mind. Plenty of companies (including my employer) have been building fully monetized software using Consul and Vault under the hood and not paying them a dime. We're a company that's valued/market capped in the Billions btw and I know plenty of other large software companies doing the same thing.

This is why they're having to make these moves. How much value have they given you vs how much have you paid? If the gap is too large, they have to start locking some things down.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#22

Post by alephnerd »

izalutski wrote: post #14
alephnerd wrote: post #9

I know most HN commentators are thinking about Terraform, but I think this change was done with Consul and Vault in mind. Plenty of companies (including my employer) have been building fully monetized software using Consul and Vault under the hood and not paying them a dime. We're a company that's valued/market capped in the Billions btw and I know plenty of other large software companies doing the same thing.

Indeed - but the Terraform community appears to be hit the hardest. Because unlike Consul, there's no open-source hostable anything. It feels just an arbitrary restriction for a language + CLI; the terms of the licence can be viewed as if whatever you ship has Terraform cli embedded, you're in breach. I can see the reason for SPL like Mongo did - it is indeed unfair for AWS to make money off hosted open-source mongod…

Based on BSL, if you aren't trying to commercialize on top of Terraform you'd still be fine.

If you're using Terraform to manage deployments in test and development it's still business as usual, but if you're actively using them in production or making a company that sells a wrapper around Terraform then you'd have to pay Hashicorp.

Honestly it's pretty fair. I can continue to make my own personal, test, or development apps using vault, consul, and terraform.

And this move was done because plenty of large companies (not naming names because this is starting to touch a legal gray area) are using Vault and Consul in production to generate hundreds of millions to billions a year in revenue.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#23

Post by SteveNuts »

Roark66 wrote: post #19

In this I'm mostly concerned by the extremely vague description of what is it you can't do with this new terraform commercially. You can't "compete" with hashicorp. Well, if I'm doing devops consulting and I write terraform for clients is it competing with hashicorp? If not, what if they start offering such service tomorrow? Will it be competition them? Personally, speaking figuratively, I think they just pulled a sh…

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure writing terraform files is just fine. The issue comes when you take the source code from Terraform, package it, and resell it in some form commercially.

So, if you were AWS, you can't create "Elastic Terraform Service" using the TF source code as the base of your product.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#24

Post by lars_francke »

igorzij wrote: post #2

Hashicorp switched Terraform from MPL to BSL yesterday. Many other companies did that in the past to prevent others taking their code and charging for running it as a managed service (eg Mongo, Elastic). With Hashi however, the server-side part was never open-source to start with. There was no such thing as "open-source Terraform Server". And now it seems that any commercial product that uses the Terraform language u…

You use TACOS as if it is well known. It isn't by me.

Seems to stand for "Terraform Automation and COlaboration Software"

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#25

Post by sharms »

bovermyer wrote: post #17
jen20 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they be? Pulumi talks to providers at the protocol level - contrary to the belief of many, Pulumi is not a Terraform wrapper.

I thought they used portions of Terraform's code. Clearly, based on my downvotes, I'm mistaken and should be ashamed.

I think it was still a good question. Pulumi is relevant if we talk about cloud orchestration in general, and is a Terraform alternative. Terraform is an abstraction over cloud APIs and there isn't anything which would stop the development of a HCL -> Pulumi compiler for example.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#26

Post by alephnerd »

robertlagrant wrote: post #21
alephnerd wrote: post #9

I know most HN commentators are thinking about Terraform, but I think this change was done with Consul and Vault in mind. Plenty of companies (including my employer) have been building fully monetized software using Consul and Vault under the hood and not paying them a dime. We're a company that's valued/market capped in the Billions btw and I know plenty of other large software companies doing the same thing.

This is why they're having to make these moves. How much value have they given you vs how much have you paid? If the gap is too large, they have to start locking some things down.

Exactly this.

Open Source software quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons because most organizations are unscrupulous. Look at how AWS destroyed the entire Elastic, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc ecosystems by abusing overly permissive licenses.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#27

Post by robertlagrant »

bovermyer wrote: post #17
jen20 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they be? Pulumi talks to providers at the protocol level - contrary to the belief of many, Pulumi is not a Terraform wrapper.

I thought they used portions of Terraform's code. Clearly, based on my downvotes, I'm mistaken and should be ashamed.

> Clearly, based on my downvotes, I'm mistaken and should be ashamed.

Downvotes are nothing more than an indicator of how many people clicked the downvote button.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#28

Post by izalutski »

Roark66 wrote: post #19

In this I'm mostly concerned by the extremely vague description of what is it you can't do with this new terraform commercially. You can't "compete" with hashicorp. Well, if I'm doing devops consulting and I write terraform for clients is it competing with hashicorp? If not, what if they start offering such service tomorrow? Will it be competition them? Personally, speaking figuratively, I think they just pulled a sh…

Yes indeed a puzzling move from Hashicorp's leadership perspective. Could be a miscalculation; or no calculation at all.

It looks like it boils down to being no longer able to "incorporate the source code or embed or distribute newer versions of Terraform." (From Spacelift's blog). For a piece of software that doesn't even have a server, this seems extremely restrictive. I wouldn't be surprised if Hashicorp takes a few steps back on this / provides clarifications for specific use cases

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#29

Post by robertlagrant »

alephnerd wrote: post #26
robertlagrant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why they're having to make these moves. How much value have they given you vs how much have you paid? If the gap is too large, they have to start locking some things down.

Exactly this. Open Source software quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons because most organizations are unscrupulous. Look at how AWS destroyed the entire Elastic, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc ecosystems by abusing overly permissive licenses.

They're not unscrupulous. They're using the software as it is licenced, which is the software's declaration of how it is allowed to be used.

The problem lies with OSS, not with people using it.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#30

Post by lrx »

SteveNuts wrote: post #23
Roark66 wrote: post #19

In this I'm mostly concerned by the extremely vague description of what is it you can't do with this new terraform commercially. You can't "compete" with hashicorp. Well, if I'm doing devops consulting and I write terraform for clients is it competing with hashicorp? If not, what if they start offering such service tomorrow? Will it be competition them? Personally, speaking figuratively, I think they just pulled a sh…

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure writing terraform files is just fine. The issue comes when you take the source code from Terraform, package it, and resell it in some form commercially. So, if you were AWS, you can't create "Elastic Terraform Service" using the TF source code as the base of your product.

Do you think anyone has ever paid Hashicorp to help write some TF scripts?
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