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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

#41

Post by alephnerd »

koolba wrote: post #35
alephnerd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You ain't wrong!

It's a major reason why I'd never release a core revenue generating feature of mine under a permissive Open Source License.

Unsrupulous implies some form of an ethical code, whereby you are judged by intent, not by action - which is an idealized view of the world but an unrealistic one at that.

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

#42

Post by rubiquity »

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.

Do you resell services that would be competing with Vault and Consul? If not I don’t see how this applies to your company’s product.

Side note: I’m not defending the license change and generally think most of HashiCorp’s products are not that great.

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

#44

Post by nunez »

lrx wrote: post #30
SteveNuts wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Absolutely! They have professional services.

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

#45

Post by articleProvider »

lrx wrote: post #30
SteveNuts wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

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

#46

Post by nunez »

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…

I wonder how this affects Pulumi, since they were using Terraform under the hood for some things IIRC.

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

#47

Post by linuxftw »

dzikimarian wrote: post #40
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.

Then they can go it alone or pay terraform.

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

#48

Post by znpy »

nunez wrote: post #43

This is awesome! The CentOS of Terraform, finally. I'll probably use this for my personal projects instead of Hashi's official stuff.

Not really.

I don't think that OpenTerraform will be able to pull the Terraform code and relicense it under the MPL.

Either this fork lives on and becomes its own thing (better or worse than the original terraform? only time will tell!) or it dies very quickly.

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

#49

Post by cube2222 »

izalutski wrote: post #37
lars_francke wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

It's actually much older than that. I think it was coined by CloudPosse with this video: https://youtu.be/4MLBpBqZmpM

(December 2020)

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