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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

#121

Post by gkapur »

igorzij wrote: post #71
gkapur wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t think it’s targeted at Vault. Vault has APIs so in the enterprise, you can self host and a vendor can manage vault through the APIs. Terraform specifically is built CLI only in the OSS so you have to repackage the underlying binary and hence are subject to the license as a vendor.

that's the most puzzling bit. Do they not want to anyone offering anything that could compete with any of Hashi's products to be able to use terraform binary at all? if so, that's similar to proprietary programming languages. Not a thing. The community can just agree on a similar but open alternative and the original company is left behind. That's why all languages and frameworks are open-source with permissive licen…

> Do they not want to anyone offering anything that could compete with any of Hashi's products to be able to use terraform binary at all?

I think they want to make it difficult for SaaS products that embed terraform (or an altered version of terraform I would assume where they have built APIs) in their product. That said, customers can install terraform so you can still hypothetically have an "integration" with Terraform where you call the raw binary (like Atlantis). So basically, they want terraform cloud to have a "privileged" user experience is my guess.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

dzikimarian wrote: post #94
linuxftw wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they can go it alone or pay terraform.

Small percent would actually pay. Due to that less and less engineers would use Terraform. In a few years most people on the market will switch to something else, that's easily accessible and it will take the crown.

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by arielcostas »

dzikimarian wrote: post #94
linuxftw wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they can go it alone or pay terraform.

Small percent would actually pay. Due to that less and less engineers would use Terraform. In a few years most people on the market will switch to something else, that's easily accessible and it will take the crown.

Good, competition incentivises innovation.

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

#124

Post by xref »

jen20 wrote: post #116
ckdarby wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writing has been on the wall. They're burning $50M loss last quarter which is mind blowing considering they had a monopoly originally. Michael raised too much money and let everything go to his head and his leadership. The internal chatter I hear is pure technical folks know this is a terrible choice, but "leadership" is so pressured and desperate given the economic headwinds they're trying to cut out any competi…

> cases around smaller deployments The size of a usable nomad cluster can absolutely dwarf the (pathetic) scaling capabilities of Kubernetes, largely thanks to the poor etcd API which simply cannot be fixed.

I’m curious what companies would run into that theoretical scaling limit, seeing as Google itself built and uses k8s/borg

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

#125

Post by lamontcg »

ckdarby wrote: post #112
pachico wrote: post #66

Shares were going down for some time, env0 (Terraform Cloud competitor) just raised 35m from VC for a what seems to be a good product... Hashicorp did it's move. If there's a community behind, the fork will live and, who knows, maybe many will start using it instead of the original one. It's all up to the community and substantial sponsors, at this point. I still think that the best way to compete is by having a more…

The writing has been on the wall. They're burning $50M loss last quarter which is mind blowing considering they had a monopoly originally. Michael raised too much money and let everything go to his head and his leadership. The internal chatter I hear is pure technical folks know this is a terrible choice, but "leadership" is so pressured and desperate given the economic headwinds they're trying to cut out any competi…

> They're burning $50M loss last quarter which is mind blowing considering they had a monopoly originally.

Their finances are pretty insane. In 2023 on sales of $475M their operating loss was $297M. And everything is going the wrong direction. They had $163M increase in operational expenses and increased revenue by only $155M. The last quarter they didn't increase revenue at all.

I don't see how the stock is worth $5.6B and any more than the $1.2B current liquidation value of the cash that they've got. How did they manage to go public at all?

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

#126

Post by jen20 »

xref wrote: post #124
jen20 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cases around smaller deployments The size of a usable nomad cluster can absolutely dwarf the (pathetic) scaling capabilities of Kubernetes, largely thanks to the poor etcd API which simply cannot be fixed.

I’m curious what companies would run into that theoretical scaling limit, seeing as Google itself built and uses k8s/borg

Nomad has more in common with Borg than Kubernetes does. The scaling limits are very real, not hypothetical.

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

#127

Post by systemBuilder »

They need to have a license structure like ARM. With ARM you can license their IP cores or you can license their architecture. Apple and NVidia and even Qualcomm have different needs (higher performance, higher process node, better battery life, and higher cost is okay for them) and they take an Architecture License (Qualcomm occasionally licenses IP cores, too.)

Spacelift and Env0 need architecture licenses. People on TF cloud essentially are licensing their IP cores. Their terraform cloud service is being run very poorly. When outsiders moved to provide an alternative for this thing which is broken inside of Hashicorp, the lawyers have been sic'd on them! That is not adult behavior. It shows a great naivety in business affairs ...

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

#128

Post by systemBuilder »

alephnerd wrote: post #39
linuxftw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Alphabet doesn't generate revenue from Go. Following your example, Alphabet should open source all the weights they use in their current search algorithm as well as the algorithm itself. And extending that principle, they should also open source the machine translation model and weights Robert DeNero made for them when at Google Translate. Both of these are dumb hypotheticals but serve to point out the fact that ther…

True, just like Qualcomm bought Eudora (mac) email for fame, Google started the Go project to keep Rob Pike (of UNIX fame) happy and to help their own internal SRE teams. The public "good will" and benefits to Google SRE have more than paid for their efforts to create the Go language, plus also there is some publicity and fame for Google having most of the remaining early UNIX guys on staff ...

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

#129

Post by _msw_ »

bityard wrote: post #20
izalutski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disclosure: I work for Amazon.

Amazon has never offered a database service based on the MongoDB server software. Not when it was AGPLv3 nor when it was SSPLv1.

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

#130

Post by nunez »

jen20 wrote: post #84
nunez wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I looked at their class docs for some of their infra resources, they very very very closely resembled their Terraform counterparts... That was several years ago, though; might be stale.

It uses the _providers_ for Terraform, but not Terraform itself, and the licenses for those are unchanged. There is an unfortunate meme that this makes it a “Terraform wrapper” like CDK for TF, which it does not.

Thanks for the clarification; I knew I was missing something.
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