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.
OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
11–20 of 137 posts
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#12Hopefully they can finally add the ability to initiate providers ad-hoc, such that you can create environments and then configure those afterwards in one go.
If you haven't checked it out already, you might want to take a look at Terragrunt[1] which is what I'm using for that purpose. In short, it can take multiple Terraform projects (stacks), track their dependencies, and run them in the correct order.
For instance, I have one stack that sets up a bunch of Hetzner Cloud vm instances and creates an RKE cluster on top of 'em, and another stack that uses the k8s provider and creates k8s resources based on the cloud instances, like a MetalLB load balancer.
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#13Hashicorp 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…
The Terraform language should not be impacted by the license change any more than the GCC license impacts code it compiles (for example). I'd love to hear any assertions to the contrary.
I think that depends exactly on the licensing.
The GPL has a specific exception for GCC that prevents it from polluting the licensing conditions of compiled programs.
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#14I 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 mongodb. But this move by Hashi I'm struggling to wrap my head around
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#15Hopefully they can finally add the ability to initiate providers ad-hoc, such that you can create environments and then configure those afterwards in one go.
If you haven't checked it out already, you might want to take a look at Terragrunt[1] which is what I'm using for that purpose. In short, it can take multiple Terraform projects (stacks), track their dependencies, and run them in the correct order. For instance, I have one stack that sets up a bunch of Hetzner Cloud vm instances and creates an RKE cluster on top of 'em, and another stack that uses the k8s provider an…
That’s what it’s for but a lot of us don’t like the added complexity.
It would be ideal if it was built in to the language.
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#16I 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.
Yes, people underestimate how important consul and vault are in modern infra. There is no direct replacement for vault or consul in how versatile and powerful these tools are.
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#17I'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.
I thought they used portions of Terraform's code.
Clearly, based on my downvotes, I'm mistaken and should be ashamed.
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#18How does this new license work in terms of either a bug is found in terraform post support date or a new feature is added to the Hashicorp version.
Can the patch / new code be copied to this version without violating anything or does it have to be some sort of “clean room” patch where you only read the bug report and not the actual fix
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#19In 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 shotgun and decided to shoot both of their feet off. 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.
Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change
#20I 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…
> it is indeed unfair for AWS to make money off hosted open-source mongodb
Why? If software authors don't understand that releasing their code under an open source license means someone else other than them may potentially benefit from it, that's really on them.