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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

#31

Post by jen20 »

sharms wrote: post #25
bovermyer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One actually exists already, built into the CLI [1]!

[1]: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/using-pulumi/adopting-pulumi/mig...

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

#32

Post by izalutski »

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.

There's a fundamental difference Terraform's "server" was never open-source in the first place So you already cannot pull the move that AWS did with Elastic and Mongo The open-source part of Terraform is the CLI, the compiler, etc Extremely puzzling move

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

#34

Post by linuxftw »

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.

Do you think Google should lock down the go language and compiler, considering how much value they've given Terraform and likely how little Terraform has paid for go itself?

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

#35

Post by koolba »

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.

Since when is abiding by the license abuse?

Oh you mean the unwritten, unenforceable, undefined, romanticized spirit of the license?

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

#36

Post by linuxftw »

I encourage this project to switch to AGPL license. Also, if you're a maintainer of a dependency of terraform and other projects, please consider doing the same. There's no way terraform can afford to support all those dependencies themselves.

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

#37

Post by izalutski »

lars_francke wrote: post #24
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"

Yeah apologies we're in a little bubble here together with Spacelift, Scale, Env0 and Atlantis so starting to assume everyone knows the niche terminology lol

Yeah so basically TACOS are ci-like tools / control planes for Terraform. The OG one being Terraform Cloud.

The term TACOS was coined by Piotr Zaniewski here: https://itnext.io/spice-up-your-infrastructure-as-code-with-...

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

#38

Post by ianbutler »

izalutski wrote: post #28
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 f…

Yeah that embed portion, I use terraform in a tool I maintain to make it easier to manage kubernetes deployments and with that embed clause that makes terraform DoA for me. It's been nice to work with but not essential, so now even though it's annoying I'll remove it next time I do a big push on the codebase.

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

#39

Post by alephnerd »

linuxftw wrote: post #34
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.

Do you think Google should lock down the go language and compiler, considering how much value they've given Terraform and likely how little Terraform has paid for go itself?

Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go.

Following your example, Alphabet should open source all the weights they use in their current search algorithm as well as the algorithm itself.

And extending that principle, they should also open source the machine translation model and weights Robert DeNero made for them when at Google Translate.

Both of these are dumb hypotheticals but serve to point out the fact that there are loss leaders and revenue generators at each company.

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

#40

Post by dzikimarian »

linuxftw wrote: post #36

I encourage this project to switch to AGPL license. Also, if you're a maintainer of a dependency of terraform and other projects, please consider doing the same. There's no way terraform can afford to support all those dependencies themselves.

As many organizations considers that AGPL may affect anything connected to it by the network and have carpet ban for applications licensed under AGPL, it would kill the project.
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