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The OpenTF Manifesto

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Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#161

Post by jaggederest »

bayindirh wrote: post #136
bloopernova wrote: post #125

If any Hashicorp people are reading, can you please tell your middle and senior management that this decision has deeply soured my entire DevOps cohort on continuing to use Terraform in the future. We're already exploring alternatives. Future client projects may not use Terraform at all. Languages and frameworks must remain open or they will wither and die.

As a Free Software advocate and supporter, I'm thinking about the answer to this question: - MPL is a weak-copyleft license, which allows companies to grab and run Terraform codebase, provide it as-is (as Terraform), or as white-labeled Terraform compatible feature/layer. This is alright (because license allows this). - These people also contribute their own fixes upstream, which is great, and maintain their own patc…

> But, HashiCorp says that, the thing we develop (i.e. Terraform) is used by others and generate revenue for them, this is great, but we can't generate enough revenue from it to keep the company afloat and continue providing TerraForm development, and sell it as a product at the same time.

> What should they do?

Suck it up, open source Terraform under a non profit foundation, find a new source of revenue. Or stop developing Terraform, cut expenditures, and move on with life.

There's no universe where "bait and switch customers who wanted open source into paying us by switching licenses" is a viable option.

> So, just because people adapted it, and HashiCorp cannot survive, should they say, we're closing shop, it's all MIT now, do whatever you want, bye!?

Exactly, you know the answer, you just don't like the implications. People somehow think that a business which started an open source project "deserves" to profit from it. They do not. Open source is a great way to get people to know who you are and build things that are interoperable with your (proprietary, closed source) SaaS offerings. It is not in itself a revenue source.

If the viability of your business is predicated on being the only one able to provide your project as a service and earn that service revenue gravy, just leave it closed source and proprietary. Sure, you won't get adoption at anywhere near the rate, but that's the tradeoff you make.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#162

Post by YetAnotherNick »

bloopernova wrote: post #125

If any Hashicorp people are reading, can you please tell your middle and senior management that this decision has deeply soured my entire DevOps cohort on continuing to use Terraform in the future. We're already exploring alternatives. Future client projects may not use Terraform at all. Languages and frameworks must remain open or they will wither and die.

> Languages and frameworks must remain open or they will wither and die.

Terraform is neither a language nor a framework, and I certainly don't think it will wither and die if they transition to BSL. Case in point, docker's revenue grew by 12x once they started taking control of their code and stopped caring about community. Same with postman or nginx or many other companies.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#163

Post by Spivak »

brikis98 wrote: post #26
dbingham wrote: post #23

I appreciate the letter and trying to work with Hashicorp -- I used to have a ton of respect for Hashicorp. But honestly... at this point... ...just fork it into a foundation. Don't wait for Hashicorp's response. I get wanting to have the appearance of working with Hashicorp, but we've been shown again, and again, and again, and a-fucking-gain that private corporations cannot be trusted to maintain public goods. Only…

The truth is that a fork hurts everyone. Imagine a future CTO trying to pick the IaC tools for their company. They see Terraform as an option, but then learn there are multiple forks, licensing questions, and a big battle happening in the community. What do they do? They are now way more likely to pick a different tool that is genuinely open source. The same is true of every dev considering where to build their caree…

I don't get this one, you pick OpenTerraform and get on with your life. It's the same with picking OpenSearch over Elastic. I can use the proprietary version that locks me into a single profit-seeking vendor and doesn't have community backing or the one run by a foundation made up of companies that use and are heavily invested in Terraform.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#164

Post by johnbellone »

fishpen0 wrote: post #77
tedivm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is they did create a viable business model. They were profitable when they had their IPO. They then pretended that the IPO was just another Series X investment, blew all the money, and went negative on their cashflow. Hashicorps problem isn't that their business model doesn't work, it's that they are really bad at their jobs. They ignore customer feedback, laid off support people, and then jacked their…

I've worked for three companies now that went to hashicorp to buy TFE and left with a quote equal to a quarter or more of revenue and the sales rep acting like they are the second coming and obviously we are stupid for not thinking they bring that much value to our org. No org invests 1/4 of their revenue on a single tool. So we used atlantis or spacelift or hand rolled GHA scripts and saved a fortune. We are trying…

It’s been that way for years with them. It’ll be interesting to see if they go the road if a private equity buyout, or they’re acquired by a technology company for the copyright/trademark.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#165

Post by yevpats »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #142

Actually, can we just kill Terraform? Please? Terraform has a bad design. It's a configuration management tool, first and foremost, and configuration management tools need to do one thing well: fix things. Not just "change state", but functionally, actually fix some software to make it work again. Terraform is really bad at this. It's difficult to configure, difficult to operate, and it likes to find any reason at al…

I think it's not only the issue with terraform but also the underlying infrastructure. AWS should've never have imperative APIs in the first place. Or at least it's time for AWS V2 APIs

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#166

Post by reidrac »

tootie wrote: post #150
bloopernova wrote: post #125

If any Hashicorp people are reading, can you please tell your middle and senior management that this decision has deeply soured my entire DevOps cohort on continuing to use Terraform in the future. We're already exploring alternatives. Future client projects may not use Terraform at all. Languages and frameworks must remain open or they will wither and die.

I'm not Hashicorp, but I mean look at Docker. They built the most valuable devops tool of the last generation and can barely muster a viable business. Why would Hashicorp give the slightest worry to losing thousands and thousands of non-paying customers? The upside is lots of money and the downside is loss of halo. Honestly, it's an unfortunate game of expectation setting. If I wrote an open letter decrying Salesforc…

It is all about the change. HashiCorp model was open source, and now is not. Salesforce has never been open source.

Would terraform have been as popular it if had never been open source? That we won't know, but we can guess.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#167

Post by cbo100 »

robbintt wrote: post #130
mousetree wrote: post #128

As a regular end-user of Terraform, what difference does BSL vs MPL make to me? From reading this article it seems not very much? Perhaps I'm misreading this.

It will affect categories of business users (programmers) who currently embrace terraform: amazon, google, microsoft, oracle, alibaba cloud. Like it or not, cohorts of engineering organizations like the above (cloud providers) have a very outsized weight and already have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow. From the article: The license does not allow you to use Terraform if you meet both o…

> have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow.

Then why didn’t they “choose” to fund hashicorp yesterday and avoid this?

As usual in OSS-goes-private events these all just sound like “keep building our critical infrastructure tool for free or we will go elsewhere”.

What is hashicorp or any other company in their position to do?

This is not sustainable.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#168

Post by r3trohack3r »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #142

Actually, can we just kill Terraform? Please? Terraform has a bad design. It's a configuration management tool, first and foremost, and configuration management tools need to do one thing well: fix things. Not just "change state", but functionally, actually fix some software to make it work again. Terraform is really bad at this. It's difficult to configure, difficult to operate, and it likes to find any reason at al…

Would be cool to see your laundry list.

I haven’t shared your experience, but I read OPs book on Terraform cover-to-cover before and trying to work with the system.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#169

Post by busterarm »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #129
busterarm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not when kubernetes is setting right there. Enjoy spending the rest of your life trying to get etcd to cooperate. If you think operating Kubernetes at scale is a cakewalk, you don't have the scale problems you think you do. I'll take consul over etcd ten million times out of ten.

Realistically you're either deploying consul on top of 1-N kubernetes clusters, or Nomad. If deploying on kubernetes, you now have all the problems that come with kubernetes, plus additional problems of trying to get consul working. I spent a week just trying to stand up a federated multi-datacenter deployment of consul on EKS before my company decided it was too much hassle

the OP was suggesting that it's just obvious to use Kubernetes instead of Nomad.

I was saying that anyone who operates large scale Kubernetes knows that you will forever be dealing with tuning etcd and fighting to keep etcd alive. It's an underpinning service of Kubernetes.

Roblox's outage was related to the intricacies of running consul and mistakes that they made.

The point I was making was that I would rather, at this scale of operation, be running Nomad and optionally Consul and optionally dealing with the intricacies of Consul than running Kubernetes and being _forced_ to deal with what a miserable pain in the ass etcd is.

I was saying that running Kubernetes is _not_ the obvious choice -- at least once you're at 10^5+ systems.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#170

Post by mdaniel »

ddon wrote: post #109
igorzij wrote: post #11

Digger here Our statement: https://medium.com/@DiggerHQ/diggers-statement-on-the-hashic...

Impossible to read, behind a paywall... why people post stuff to Medium is a big mystery to me :) Here is how your post looks like: https://postimg.cc/Pvwdw8D3

Let me introduce you to my go-to for that bullshit: https://scribe.rip/@DiggerHQ/diggers-statement-on-the-hashic...

courtesy of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838053

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