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The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

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Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why isn't OpenTF's development, done, well, in the open? What's the rationale for keeping it closed for now? I'm not critiquing, not a Terraform user so don't have any stake in this discussion, just curious.

Mostly trademark issues, really.

As in, you need to make sure you strip out all references to the Terraform trademark before you make it public?

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it shouldn't be much different than "sure, it's open source now, but what if it stops being maintained?" Because open-source code never stops being open-source, it just stops getting open-source updates. Closed-source in some situations can prevent you from using existing software; you also have other closed-source issues like bugs being unfixable. Would you rather use a service that worst-case, you have to patch…

> 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.

Not really. If you need it fixed or extended and you can't do it yourself, you can always hire someone to do it for you. With open source, you have options.

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#83
post #80

I'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?

Vault has been in use at several of my former companies. I haven't even considered what they might do.

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#84

This is such a terrible move for the ecosystem as a whole. So now it means individuals using tools like Layerform and Terragrunt cannot use the registry anymore even though the software hasn’t changed at all? How will they even enforce that?

The best way: through selective enforcement of an overly broad rule. Just like all tyrants have done.

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#85

The leadership at Hashicorp doesn't seem to "get" open source development, or at least doesn't seem to value the community of their customers. The change of license could have been attributed to them trying to protect their SaaS business if you squinted. But now they're saying "this is ours and you can't play", even though that hurts tf in the long run due to alienation of the community. I get that they need to gener…

They're a public company now and they've been unable to get to profitability. This is HashiCorp building their moat.

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#86
post #79
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I haven't tried every single one, but the AWS public ECR has a bunch of the "library" images from Docker Hub (e.g. public.ecr.aws/docker/library/golang:1.21 ) and as the "public" part implies, no creds required to access it

They do have a search interface, if one wanted to look for their favorite: https://gallery.ecr.aws/

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#87

Not 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.…

This is the same situation as with Microsoft, Visual Studio Code, and OpenVSX. It's covered in depth here: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly trademark issues, really.

As in, you need to make sure you strip out all references to the Terraform trademark before you make it public?

More or less, yes. This is a complex legal topic. Also, we need to make sure we don't violate the new registry T&Cs.

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the providers might actually come from GitHub because the registry insists you have them as release assets

That indeed seems to be the case. Seems that for community providers, HashiCorp is serving up JSON which refers to GitHub download links. Here’s a sample size of 1: https://registry.terraform.io/v1/providers/spacelift-io/spac... According to the provider registry protocol, which I have previously implemented for internal hosting (in an afternoon of writing a single file of Python): https://developer.hashicorp.com/ter…

For their own managed providers they no longer provide binaries in GitHub releases, and serve them from their own servers instead. Which feels like a trap BTW.

Re: The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updated

#90
post #6
post #3

Even though this will likely prevent OpenTF from connecting to registry.terraform.io to get plugins, the source code for most (all?) plugins is still open source and actually stored on GitHub (e.g. https://github.com/terraform-provider-openstack/terraform-pr... ). More work for OpenTF to get up and running, but also feels reasonable that HashiCorp wouldn't allow connecting to their service.

>still open source and actually stored on GitHub I think that's true, but it's probably hard to recreate large parts of the index. I don't think there's any mandatory manifest or something like that where you can reliably identify a repo as something that appears in their registry. Probably some missing metadata too.

The publishing process for the public registry is very prescriptive, and there is indeed a manifest file involved - https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/registry/providers...
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