Silently infers they're trying to sneak something in without everyone knowing but the discussion has been going on for a few weeks now, iirc? They just finally made the change they said there going to make or is this something else?
The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
71–80 of 136 posts
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sad too, mitchellh used to be fairly active in the HN community but it seems he is not able to for likely professional reasons after the BSL fiasco.
Mitchell is a wonderful hacker. He’s someone who gets what an open source company is/should be better than many who tried. I suspect he doesn’t feel great about what’s happening with the company…
> He’s someone who _gets_ what an open source company is/should be better than many who tried.
I would have expected him to put in place mechanisms making the license change impossible, if he got that well what an open source company should be.
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would you rather use a service that worst-case, you have to patch and maintain yourselves? Having to patch and maintain a complex piece of open source code yourself for most smaller non tech companies for all practical purposes means that it might as well be abandoned closed source code.
Even for tech companies, the problem becomes that's yet one more thing to maintain. I'm perfectly capable of maintaining a fork if I need to, but that doesn't mean I have the time and energy to do so.
Are you capable of maintaining a fork no matter the language or level of complexity? Are you going to maintain your own fork of Chromium? WebKit? MySQL?
But if you don’t have the time or energy, you don’t have the capability.
I might as well say I have the capability of flying my own private plane if I had the money to buy the plane and the time to learn how to fly it.
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#74I mean it's reasonable for HashiCorp to limit who uses their infrastructure since they foot the bill for it. Google did a similar thing for the Chrome Web Store to download extensions when Microsoft released Edge, pushing Microsoft to host its own distribution channel.
The registry is more similar to https://sum.golang.org/ than the Chrome Web Store. It pretty much just stores a checksum database, a list of links to github (which actually hosts the cross-compiled binaries), a channel [Official, Partner, Community], some ownership metadata, and some static markdown per provider/module version for documentation.
E.g. back-of-envelope for terraform providers this is:
Metadata: 4KB JSON [0] * ~15 OS/arch combinations * ~50 versions * ~3000 providers = ~10GB in total
Docs: ~700Kb [1] * ~50 versions * ~3000 providers = ~100GB in total
[0] Source: https://registry.terraform.io/v1/providers/airbytehq/airbyte...
[1] Source: https://github.com/airbytehq/terraform-provider-airbyte/tree... gzipped : ~300 resources, ~300 data sources
(NB: in airbyte's case the TF Provider was generated from a ~150Kb OpenAPI spec via https://speakeasyapi.dev: implying docs could be compressed even more)
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#75I had Hashicorp in my mind as a cool and respectful company. These recent events have made to reconsider and throw them into the same bag as Oracle. I find this pretty sad.
I used to think Hashicorp was a company I would have liked to work for. I no longer think that.
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#76Companies want the benefits of open source (massive community contributions, lower development costs, better security, community exposure, marketshare) but don't like the downsides (from their perspective: forks, lack of control, freeloaders etc). TOS changes like this are fine, it's their garden, but ultimately all they'll do is put even more power behind forks and alternatives. Because the people that were motivate…
This is the same series of events that we saw (and continue to see) play out after IBM attempted to shut off access to Redhat by competitors. They had control of every user's attention, and they exerted huge control over the direction of development. They lost control when they gutted CentOS, and now their competitors are banding together to make their own offerings. This might end up fragmenting their ecosystem in t…
It's to be expected. I've yet to see a corporate take-over by a strategic player where there wasn't some major downside for those who helped establish the acquired party in the first place. It always feels like being stabbed in the back.
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even for tech companies, the problem becomes that's yet one more thing to maintain. I'm perfectly capable of maintaining a fork if I need to, but that doesn't mean I have the time and energy to do so.
Are you capable of maintaining a fork no matter the language or level of complexity? Are you going to maintain your own fork of Chromium? WebKit? MySQL? But if you don’t have the time or energy, you don’t have the capability. I might as well say I have the capability of flying my own private plane if I had the money to buy the plane and the time to learn how to fly it.
Obviously yes, the more complex the more difficult. And if it's a technology you don't have experience with it's going to be extremely difficult to impossible. But that's not what I'm talking about.
I'll give a clearer example taken from my actual job:
At my job, we needed to use a NodeJS library to accomplish something. We found one, but it eventually fell out of maintenance. We discovered a bug that was blocking us from continuing to use it, so we had the choice: fork it or find an alternative. We chose to find an alternative because even though we had the technical capability and understanding to fork the library and fix the bug, we realized that would be one more piece of infrastructure that would take time and energy from our team which are a finite supply.
It's more equivalent of an airline pilot saying "I wish I had more time and energy to fly a plane for fun, and not just for work." The ability is there, just not the bandwidth.
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there commercial FOSS projects that don't have CLAs?
I responded to > any effort to bring in some OSS project as a dependency will be met with "Sure, it's open source now, but what about when...". If you'd like to constrain that to commercial OSS projects it would be more compelling.
The comment you responded to began with the sentence:
>I think this damages all commercial OSS projects.
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#79Not the OP, but I suspect HN has trimmed the anchor link. > https://github.com/opentffoundation/roadmap/issues/24#issuec... That's the comment that made the issue clear -- specifically TOS were amended for https://registry.terraform.io to state: > You may download providers, modules, policy libraries and/or other Services or Content from this website __solely for use with, or in support of, HashiCorp Terraform.__ ie.…
> But, I guess if OpenTF is taking a position of "Use us instead of Terraform", then they shouldn't expect to get the usage of Hashicorps infra. It’s totally something they can do, but it seems short-sighted. They had to know that this wouldn’t actually stop the momentum around OpenTF, but just result in HashiCorp giving up the control they have over the canonical namespace. As precedent, Docker allows Kubernetes and…
> As precedent, Docker allows Kubernetes and Podman to access its registry, for example.
Don’t give them any ideas. Nothing would stop them, though it is probably hard to actually enforce on a public repo.
Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated
#80I've seen a lot about OpenTF and I applaud the (very large) effort to get a viable alternative in place in short order. Is anyone aware of corresponding projects for other tools in the HashiCorp suite?