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

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51–60 of 137 posts

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

#51
post #11

I'm curious if Pulumi is interested in this.

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

Last time I looked at their class docs for some of their infra resources, they very very very closely resembled their Terraform counterparts...

That was several years ago, though; might be stale.

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

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

No. My point was, companies should make money from services, not software. I believe all software should have a FOSS license.

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

#53

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.

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

It means you can't provide a CI/CD pipeline for terraform as a service. Because that would overlap with functionality of terraform cloud and enterprise.

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

#54

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.

One should wonder why companies love "open source" software so much and despise "free software" even more.

On the matter, Grafana has relicensed most of its software to AGPLv3 (eg: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/main/LICENSE)

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

#55

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.

You can't use BSL licensed products in production without paying the provider.

Plenty of companies are using Vault and Consul in this manner.

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

#57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It means you can't provide a CI/CD pipeline for terraform as a service. Because that would overlap with functionality of terraform cloud and enterprise.

Not necessarily; only if that CI/CD pipeline actually benefits from Hashicorp's code one way or another (embed, distribute, etc). I highly doubt that Hashi would consider Gitlab in breach of their license because they have support of Terraform state in their pipelines. Classic TACOS eg Scalr and similar might be in a somewhat bigger trouble as they have to have the terraform binary as part of their solution. But even then, they can remove all traces of terraform from their product and require the user to install a docker image with terraform version of user's choice.

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

#58
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…

IANAL but probably Hashicorp has some trademark over "Terraform" in this context. I don't know if it's 100% safe for you to call it "Open Terraform".

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

#59
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it is indeed unfair for AWS to make money off hosted open-source mongodb Why? If software authors don't understand that releasing their code under an open source license means someone else other than them may potentially benefit from it, that's really on them.

Authors do understand the benefits of OSS development.

Predatory unethical open source freeloaders don’t.

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

#60

How does this new license work in terms of either a bug is found in terraform post support date or a new feature is added to the Hashicorp version. Can the patch / new code be copied to this version without violating anything or does it have to be some sort of “clean room” patch where you only read the bug report and not the actual fix

I think appropriating code against the license would be a license violation. Whether it's a bug or a feature doesn't really make any difference. If it's not licensed for copying, then you can't copy it. You can't re-license it without permission.

That's why they are saying it's not an "open source" license anymore – because it's not. Source available means just that. You can read it (say for the purpose of figuring out some annoying bug so you can contribute the fix upstream) and you can probably build and run it, so long as your use is according to the terms granted in the license. But you can't redistribute it, any copy you take probably isn't yours, and it's only usable according to the terms of the license.

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