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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

#91

Post by Nilithus »

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.

I'm also surprised no one is really mentioning Nomad in this discussion either, I know for a fact circleci used nomad at some point to schedule CI tasks on worker machines. If I create a SaaS product that runs programs which get scheduled with nomad under the hood is that a breach of the license?

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

#92

Post by erik_seaberg »

izalutski wrote: post #14
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.

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…

> unfair for AWS to make money off hosted open-source

Competition is healthy. Everyone should be reluctant to lock himself in with a vendor seeking a monopoly.

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

#93

Post by jnsaff2 »

tetha wrote: post #70
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.

On the other hand, we wanted to give them money to have a support contract, maybe some yearly architecture reviews or a call with a consultant to point us towards new features. We have similar agreements with e.g. AWS, we're looking at setting something like this up with a postgres consultancy. However, the smallest offering was solidly in the six figures a year. That put it into a very different investment process,…

I had the same experience, wanted to give them money but not six figures for each service we used.

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

#94

Post by dzikimarian »

linuxftw wrote: post #47
dzikimarian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Small percent would actually pay. Due to that less and less engineers would use Terraform. In a few years most people on the market will switch to something else, that's easily accessible and it will take the crown.

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

#95

Post by yellowapple »

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…

> As someone doing devops consultancy since well before terraform became a thing I'd have no problem at all going back to custom python code with configuration in yaml if the clients decide its better for them.

Or for that matter, custom Python code with Pulumi - which AFAICT ain't pulling these sorts of shenanigans (yet).

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

#96

Post by yellowapple »

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.

> I know most HN commentators are thinking about Terraform, but I think this change was done with Consul and Vault in mind.

Clearly Terraform was also in mind, since Terraform is now under the BUSL: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/main/LICENSE

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

#97

Post by yellowapple »

robertlagrant wrote: post #29
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.

They're not unscrupulous. They're using the software as it is licenced, which is the software's declaration of how it is allowed to be used. The problem lies with OSS, not with people using it.

The problem lies with people expecting to apply non-FOSS monetization strategies to FOSS.

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

#98

Post by yellowapple »

alephnerd wrote: post #39
linuxftw wrote: post #34

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…

> Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go.

Hashicorp doesn't generate revenue from Terraform.

(They do generate revenue from Terraform Cloud, but that's a backend for Terraform, not Terraform itself)

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

#99

Post by yellowapple »

morgante wrote: post #64
alephnerd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use BSL licensed products in production without paying the provider. Plenty of companies are using Vault and Consul in this manner.

That is not accurate. BSL does not prevent simply using the products, it prevents packaging them into a competing offering. Review the FAQ here: https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq

> BSL does not prevent simply using the products, it prevents packaging them into a competing offering.

The problem is that "competing offering" is poorly defined.

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

#100

Post by chenrui »

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-...

atlantis would be fine, see this comment, https://github.com/runatlantis/atlantis/issues/3663#issuecom...
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