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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

#71

Post by igorzij »

gkapur wrote: post #61
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.

Don’t think it’s targeted at Vault. Vault has APIs so in the enterprise, you can self host and a vendor can manage vault through the APIs. Terraform specifically is built CLI only in the OSS so you have to repackage the underlying binary and hence are subject to the license as a vendor.

that's the most puzzling bit. Do they not want to anyone offering anything that could compete with any of Hashi's products to be able to use terraform binary at all?

if so, that's similar to proprietary programming languages. Not a thing. The community can just agree on a similar but open alternative and the original company is left behind. That's why all languages and frameworks are open-source with permissive licenses.

and if not, if it's just about the hosted / managed parts - then what exactly is it that I can use wrongly? Terraform Cloud / Enterprise was never open source. There's nothing I can self-host and charge users for...

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

#72

Post by b3orn »

nunez wrote: post #51
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.

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.

Isn't that to be expected? I only used Terraform for AWS, but the Terraform resources correspond almost directly to those of AWS CloudFormation and AWS's API.

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

#73

Post by Zetice »

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…

> And now it seems that any commercial product that uses the Terraform language under the hood is at risk of violating the terms of the license.

Has an attorney who practices in this area reviewed this sentence in their capacity as an attorney (e.g. to a client of theirs, and not as free legal advice on Twitter et. al.)?

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

#74

Post by igorzij »

alephnerd wrote: post #22
izalutski wrote: post #14

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…

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 developme…

with Vault and Consul that makes a ton of sense; they're centralised backend services that are inherently SaaS-like. But expanding the "on top of terraform" definition to a CLI / language? That's insane. It's like making a programming language or framework proprietary and saying you can't sell anything written in the language without the language creator's permission. I guess such languages did exist in the early days of the industry but those days are long gone

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

#75

Post by yebyen »

linuxftw wrote: post #63
yebyen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I think there's a compelling argument to be made for bug fixes and small changes being derivative works of the originally licensed open source software. As such, it's unlikely that the 'copyright' of those small changes would be able to stand on their own. Perhaps 'derivative works' isn't the right term. I know there's some exceptions for copyright when there's 'one way' to do something, or something that substantial…

You might be thinking of the "obviousness test" for patents. If an invention is a combination of two things which are established prior art, and there is a suggestion, teaching, or motivation which any person could discover through straightforward analysis of the existing prior art, then it's not a patentable innovation.

There being one right way to solve a problem, doesn't really change whether a bit is copied or not. If you have a bug and there's one right way to solve the issue, then you don't need to copy the original. You can reproduce the bug and solve the issue, and any similarity between the independent solutions is coincidental.

If you take the source code and accept the new license terms, I think you'll be bound by the terms. I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the full text of the BUSL-1.1 but I will now, since that's probably the best way to understand what the license does or does not do.

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

#76

Post by igorzij »

pachico wrote: post #66

Shares were going down for some time, env0 (Terraform Cloud competitor) just raised 35m from VC for a what seems to be a good product... Hashicorp did it's move. If there's a community behind, the fork will live and, who knows, maybe many will start using it instead of the original one. It's all up to the community and substantial sponsors, at this point. I still think that the best way to compete is by having a more…

We are in some sense a competitor too, alongside Spacelift, Env0, Scalr and a few others. Our product is built differently though, Digger is orchestrating terraform jobs in your existing CI instead of taking over the whole CI stack and effectively duplicating it just to run terraform. We built it this way almost by accident; our original product was very different (think "heroku-like UI for AWS" that generated and ran terraform on the server) and this is how we arrived at what Digger is now. Luckily we don't seem to be affected by the licensing change as we neither embed nor distribute any of hashicorp's code (it's on the user to set up the right version of it in say GH Actions).

https://github.com/diggerhq/digger

Anyways, fully agree that if you have a great product, you don't need to make such moves. We designed our product the way we did purely out of technical considerations - it didn't seem to make any sense to duplicate the CI stack. But it looks like this whole idea behind Terraform Cloud of having an "infra-specific CI" was driven exclusively by commercial interest. You can charge per minute! You can charge even more per resource! Now it's catching up with Hashi; so they have to make such defensive moves. If the product made sense technically, if it was designed the way someone would design it with no commercial considerations whatsoever, they wouldn't have to make such moves.

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

#77

Post by dkuntz2 »

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.

the tragedy of the commons is a thoroughly debunked though experiment, and actual studies show that in the real world, just like in this case, the real tragedy of the commons is when one entity (hashicorp) is able to monopolize a common good (open source software with contributions from tons of people outside of hashicorp) in a way everyone who was being a good user of the commons (by contributing back to those projects) is opposed to because it actively destroys something everyone was using collaboratively.

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

#78

Post by dralley »

alephnerd wrote: post #65
linuxftw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely underestimate them because in my last 7 roles I haven't used either. I don't know how far back 'modern' goes, but 3 roles were over the last 24 months (just started a new role) and none of those roles the companies used consul or vault to manage anything.

If you've ever done a credit card transaction or any form of dollar based transaction, it's using software directly built on top of Consul.

Are there public details about this? Are you referring to the Visa Network or something related?

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

linuxftw wrote: post #52
alephnerd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

dralley wrote: post #78
alephnerd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've ever done a credit card transaction or any form of dollar based transaction, it's using software directly built on top of Consul.

Are there public details about this? Are you referring to the Visa Network or something related?

[deleted]
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