Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu • Hacker News Board

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#11

Post by pwarner » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:35 AM UTC

benrutter wrote: post #2

This is a pretty interesting development. Anyone know the userbase/impact of "Oracle EBS"? I don't know much about Oracle's services so can't figure if this is a huge number of users, of a small subset of their clients.

Yeah this sounds like a very narrow use case shifting. That of moving your EBS ERP application to Oracle cloud from on premise. I mean, people are doing that migration and it's exciting if they are actually using iac, but this can't represent large usage of Terraform.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#12

Post by trueismywork » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:39 AM UTC

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #5

A giant corporation like Oracle switching to the fork because they don’t want to engage commercially with Hashicorp is peak greedy.

More than the money, it's the license servers that make your life miserable

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#13

Post by dralley » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:42 AM UTC

jph wrote: post #4

"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream license complications, no more and no less." Oracle wins a big competitive talking point versus IBM, as well as crushing the value of IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp, and completely eliminating IBM's Terraform inroad into a large group of Oracle's enterprise custom…

I don't see how any of this could be true considering IBM is also heavily involved in OpenTofu (and did so first)

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#14

Post by croes » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:42 AM UTC

Lockal wrote: post #8

"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream license complications, no more and no less." Hm, with that logic they could dump MySQL in favor of MariaDB as well

Oracle owns MySQL but not Terraform

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#15

Post by EspadaV9 » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:49 AM UTC

dralley wrote: post #13

jph wrote: post #4

"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream license complications, no more and no less." Oracle wins a big competitive talking point versus IBM, as well as crushing the value of IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp, and completely eliminating IBM's Terraform inroad into a large group of Oracle's enterprise custom…

I don't see how any of this could be true considering IBM is also heavily involved in OpenTofu (and did so first)

I was wondering, once IBM got Hashicorp, if they would reverse the license change for Terraform. Not been that long since the announcement, so still hoping they will.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#16

Post by ig1 » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:50 AM UTC

Following IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp the moves seems unsurprising, they wouldn't want to be beholden to a competitor.

We'll inevitably see others large companies follow suite - it was one thing when hashicorp was independent tech company but it's very different when it's owned by a direct competitor.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#17

Post by rswail » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:50 AM UTC

Oracle making the change due to licensing is like a dictionary definition of hubris, considering how their own license enforcement operates.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#18

Post by m1keil » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:54 AM UTC

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #5

A giant corporation like Oracle switching to the fork because they don’t want to engage commercially with Hashicorp is peak greedy.

It is not Oracle who are using terraform, it is their customers. Terraform is the underline tech that powers the tooling suit that the customers use to manage their oracle cloud.

It makes perfect sense for them to push their customers to move to the more permissive licensing to avoid any legal issues.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#19

Post by alephnerd » Wed, May 15, 2024, 11:59 AM UTC

pwarner wrote: post #10

jph wrote: post #4

"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream license complications, no more and no less." Oracle wins a big competitive talking point versus IBM, as well as crushing the value of IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp, and completely eliminating IBM's Terraform inroad into a large group of Oracle's enterprise custom…

I think Oracle Linux was a similar approach to let their customers use RedHat Linux without paying RedHat, now also IBM.

Oracle Linux has been a thing for decades.

It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#20

Post by 8organicbits » Wed, May 15, 2024, 12:03 PM UTC

We're seeing an uptick in open source projects getting relicenced to non-open licenses. Some projects are successfully forked and the userbase shifts, other times not.

One theory of mine is that we can measure the risk that a project will be relicensed by looking at things like diversity of contributors, trademark ownership, contributor agreements, and license terms. Low risk projects include the Linux kernel (GPL, DCO) [1]. High risk projects include Kubernetes (Apache, CLA) [2].

If this trend continues developers will need to get a better understanding of how relicencing works and may decide to avoid contributing to projects with elevated risk.

[1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/linux/

[2] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/kubernetes/