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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

#81

Post by zhynn »

dkuntz2 wrote: post #77
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.

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 proje…

I have been thinking a lot about the tragedy of the commons (totc) within the context of usufructian socialist services and expanding them beyond their fairly narrow use case currently (public libraries are the biggest example). I was theorycrafting community makerspaces, tool libraries, and public baths, but I was hung up on thinking about totc. Do you have some sources that you would recommend for more detail on refuting or debunking totc? Thanks!

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

#83

Post by Iammadeofpizza »

igorzij wrote: post #76
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 ra…

To copy the comment from Reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/15o9mzt/openterr...

> Funny enough, our own product (Digger, an open-source CI runner for Terraform) is not using Terraform (or any other Hashicorp's code) under the hood.

Oh yes you are:

https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/blob/develop/pkg/core/ter...

You're on thin ice if you want to argue whether forking a terraform process constitutes "hosting" or "embedding" terraform.

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

#84

Post by jen20 »

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.

It uses the _providers_ for Terraform, but not Terraform itself, and the licenses for those are unchanged.

There is an unfortunate meme that this makes it a “Terraform wrapper” like CDK for TF, which it does not.

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

#85

Post by mdaniel »

CommanderData wrote: post #56

I wonder if the license change also applies to HCL? Which I'm seeing more and more use of in open source projects unrelated to IaC.

no, it and a ton of other things in their GH org are still MPL (for now): https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl-lang/blob/main/LICENSE including, confusingly https://github.com/hashicorp/boundary/blob/main/LICENSE which I would have thought would have fallen into the same "but AWS gonna steal our shit" fearmongering as Nomad, did to say nothing of the future in which AWS offers Managed Vagrant™ :eyeroll:

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

#86

Post by sciurus »

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…

As has been pointed out elsewhere in the comments, this is incorrect. The switch to BSL does not mean you have to start paying Hashicorp to use their formerly OSS products in production. To quote their FAQ:

> All non-production uses are permitted. All production uses are allowed other than hosting or embedding the software in an offering competitive with HashiCorp products or services.

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

#87

Post by igorzij »

Iammadeofpizza wrote: post #83
igorzij wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

To copy the comment from Reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/15o9mzt/openterr... > Funny enough, our own product (Digger, an open-source CI runner for Terraform) is not using Terraform (or any other Hashicorp's code) under the hood. Oh yes you are: https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/blob/develop/pkg/core/ter... You're on thin ice if you want to argue whether forking a terraform process constitutes "hos…

if Hashi chooses to enforce it to such extent that even calling a terraform binary (which is open source itself for now) constitues "embedding"... then good luck Hashi staying an "open source company". The days of proprietary programming languages are long gone. They appear to be confusing the languages / frameworks space with self-hostables. BSL makes total sense for Mongo / Elastic (as well as Vault or Consul). Not so much for a CLI / compiler thingie which Terraform is.

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

#88

Post by pachico »

igorzij wrote: post #87
Iammadeofpizza wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To copy the comment from Reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/15o9mzt/openterr... > Funny enough, our own product (Digger, an open-source CI runner for Terraform) is not using Terraform (or any other Hashicorp's code) under the hood. Oh yes you are: https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/blob/develop/pkg/core/ter... You're on thin ice if you want to argue whether forking a terraform process constitutes "hos…

if Hashi chooses to enforce it to such extent that even calling a terraform binary (which is open source itself for now) constitues "embedding"... then good luck Hashi staying an "open source company". The days of proprietary programming languages are long gone. They appear to be confusing the languages / frameworks space with self-hostables. BSL makes total sense for Mongo / Elastic (as well as Vault or Consul). Not…

I think it's quite clear they don't care about being called an open source company, which is fine, as I see it.

This will shake the sandbox. I personally hope that the community will step up with a fork.

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

#89

Post by dpeckett »

Iammadeofpizza wrote: post #83
igorzij wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

To copy the comment from Reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/15o9mzt/openterr... > Funny enough, our own product (Digger, an open-source CI runner for Terraform) is not using Terraform (or any other Hashicorp's code) under the hood. Oh yes you are: https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/blob/develop/pkg/core/ter... You're on thin ice if you want to argue whether forking a terraform process constitutes "hos…

What a smackdown! You guys had me thinking you'd written a custom executor engine or something of that nature.

I've spent a fair amount of time digging around the terraform codebase and hacking on providers. I'm not too worried about the license change tbh, almost all the important IP is locked up in the provider codebases and no matter what direction hashicorp goes those providers will remain open.

The question will be, how are those providers executed? Most likely an open terraform fork will fill that role for the foreseeable future. But long-term I think hashicorp just handed IaC to crossplane and pulumi.

I think ACK from AWS and k8s-config-connector from GCP probably represent the future of IaC. Crossplane is neat and all and pioneered the architecture but using the cloud provider native operators directly will always be a better experience. The question will be what the next generation of TACOS frontend tools look like.

Rewriting a provider into a kubernetes reconciler isn't an impossible undertaking and the tools for doing so are improving at a rapid rate. I recently finished up on a major project writing a kubernetes controller for a private cloud platform.

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

#90

Post by cthalupa »

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.

I'm assuming you're missing some words here, probably "with Stripe"

The idea that every credit card transaction or any form of dollar based transaction works on software directly built on Consul is patently false.

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