Live data from Hacker News

Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

thestack.technology

131–140 of 191 posts

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#131
post #73
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyleft is not required, free software is a gift freely given. Even public domain is ok (weird places like Germany that don’t have public domain notwithstanding). What must be rejected is nonfree licenses like the BSL.

BSL is preferrable to completely closed because at least researchers can look at it now and it will eventually transition to open source. If Windows XP was BSL licensed then Wine would have a lot less trouble now.

I disagree. I don’t face any copyright issues from writing code that resembles something in Windows. I never had access to its source code, so any similarities have to be purely coincidental.

A BSL project could say, hey, look at this guy stealing our code!, even if I’ve never seen it. I could have, and that opens a plausible risk I wish I didn’t have.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#132
post #75
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I dislike Oracle's biz practices (I'd not touch their db product with a stick), they do a lot of FLOSS devt: https://opensource.oracle.com/ (almost endless list) But then they have take FLOSS projects and abandoned them, see OOo for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#/media/File:...

Looking through that list, most of the big projects (OpenJDK, Mysql, Opengrok) were inherited as part of acquisitions.

> Looking through that list, most of the big projects (OpenJDK, Mysql, Opengrok) were inherited as part of acquisitions.

I see this argument a lot, but I'm not sure how it detracts from their continued development. Oracle funds many engineers working on OSS and, despite having CLAs in place, retain the permissive license for most of them. In some cases they've acquired closed source software and made it open source (e.g., JRockit stuff). They're a major contributor to OSS.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#133
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

Funny that you mention MariaDB. Oracle bought MySQL which was forked into MariaDB. MariaDB created the Business Source License (BSL). Hashicorp switches Terraform to BSL which then leads to Terraform being forked into OpenTofu. OpenTofu seems to be getting adopted by Oracle.

Full circle of corporate facepalm

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#134
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BSL is preferrable to completely closed because at least researchers can look at it now and it will eventually transition to open source. If Windows XP was BSL licensed then Wine would have a lot less trouble now.

I disagree. I don’t face any copyright issues from writing code that resembles something in Windows. I never had access to its source code, so any similarities have to be purely coincidental. A BSL project could say, hey, look at this guy stealing our code!, even if I’ve never seen it. I could have, and that opens a plausible risk I wish I didn’t have.

> I don’t face any copyright issues from writing code that resembles something in Windows. I never had access to its source code, so any similarities have to be purely coincidental.

> A BSL project could say, hey, look at this guy stealing our code!, even if I’ve never seen it. I could have, and that opens a plausible risk I wish I didn’t have.

By that argument, you could have looked at Windows code too, since Windows source code has leaked multiple times, and 5 minutes of searching will find it.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#135
post #17

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

Oracle takes hostages, they know how to avoid being taken hostage. Not hubris, just tactics.

It would be hubris if they tried to then take the moral high ground.

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#136
> What is OpenTofu?

>

> OpenTofu is a Terraform fork, created as an initiative of Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr, and others, in response to HashiCorp’s switch from an open-source license to the BUSL. The initiative has many supporters, all of whom are listed here.

I still have no idea what I am looking at. I know that probably means this product isn't for me, but it peeves me when products do this. "What is X? X is like Y!"

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#137

> What is OpenTofu? > > OpenTofu is a Terraform fork, created as an initiative of Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr, and others, in response to HashiCorp’s switch from an open-source license to the BUSL. The initiative has many supporters, all of whom are listed here. I still have no idea what I am looking at. I know that probably means this product isn't for me, but it peeves me when products do this. "What…

OpenTofu is Terraform

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#138
post #92

Slightly off-topic, but one of my greatest pet-peeves of working in devops is every few years a new "killer tech" comes out that some contingent of very-highly-opinionated (though not always very senior) people insists is life-and-death stakes and wants the whole company to move to (e.g. terraform). Too often it's a failure. Too often it has some upsides, but also is a LOT of work that is discovered over time. Too of…

if moving to terraform fails for your org, you have much deeper issues that likely aren’t related to terraform

> if moving to terraform fails for your org, you have much deeper issues that likely aren’t related to terraform

That is nonsense.

You just said, equivalently, "Terraform is all things to all people".

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the majority of code in Linux is created by corporate employees getting paid to make changes. Those companies are merely helping to “commoditize their complements”

That's not really a problem as long as the source license stays the same. If Amazon or Microsoft need a feature in the kernel, nobody tends to care as long as it's GPL. > Those companies are merely helping to “commoditize their complements” That's how they justify it internally, yeah. From an administrative standpoint it's pretty obvious that they all choose Linux because it's easier than retrofitting proprietary UNI…

I think you may have misinterpreted the parent comment. "Complement" as in a complementary good in economics terms. Not "complimentary", as in free. There's a good article on this by Joel Spolsky

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Re: Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

#140

> What is OpenTofu? > > OpenTofu is a Terraform fork, created as an initiative of Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr, and others, in response to HashiCorp’s switch from an open-source license to the BUSL. The initiative has many supporters, all of whom are listed here. I still have no idea what I am looking at. I know that probably means this product isn't for me, but it peeves me when products do this. "What…

Infra as code. Write a template for a Spanner table in your GCP account. If it doesn't already exist, OpenTofu will notice and offer to send the API call to create it.

It's like using AWS CloudFormation or GCP Deployment Manager, but supports quite a few cloud vendors with the same tools.

Post reply on HN