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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

#101

Post by pjmlp »

linuxftw wrote: post #34
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.

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?

My employer pays for Visual Studio, JetBrains, Mac tax + dev license pays for XCode, Oracle, SQL Server,...

I guess it is up to Google to decide how to monetize Go, or who knows, maybe some day they will put it into a foundation of sorts that should find a way to keep sponsoring its development.

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

#102

Post by spott »

nunez wrote: post #46
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.

I don’t think they were running terraform, they were converting terraform code to Pulumi code as a way to bootstrap their supported services/clouds/etc.

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

#103

Post by nijave »

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.

How has Amazon destroyed these ecosystems? As far as I know, all of these products are very much alive and well.

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

#104

Post by nijave »

sciurus wrote: post #86
alephnerd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't this eliminate any managed runners since they'd compete with Terraform Cloud?

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

#105

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

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.

Particularly with corporate charity (aka "permissive") licenses. If you want the source to stay open for users further down the chain, use a license that requires that.

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

#106

Post by yellowapple »

jen20 wrote: post #11
bovermyer wrote: post #3

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.

A sort of franken-Terraform that treats (some dialect of) HCL as yet another Pulumi frontend language would be interesting.

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

#107

Post by rahkiin »

mdaniel wrote: post #85
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:

That last link clearly says BSL though

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

#108

Post by simon_turner »

klysm wrote: post #10
jakozaur wrote: post #7

Well, can next Terraform successor be build by few vendors and community, not just a single one? Not a single vendor should own it all or even the majority.

Unclear how that would work in practice to me without some shitty half followed standards

Apache Software Foundation?

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

#110

Post by ckdarby »

nunez wrote: post #46
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.

Pulumi itself isn't doing anything.

The TF bridge is interacting. If they really want to remove liability they'd just leave TF out of the repo and shift all liability to the end user where the first step runs a package install that brings in terraform.

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