Isn’t all agreements to limit competition illegal in EU/Europe? Even collaboration between competitors agains a 3. part is illegal.
The rest of the agreement is still valid, just the completion part is nullified
The OpenTF Manifesto
21–30 of 392 posts
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#22I think the problem is that if hashicorp thinks you are a competitor you and your clients now have legal/operational issues. Ie you are now a competitor because we are releasing a product just like yours, here is a letter from a lawyer telling you to stop using terraform.
> if hashicorp thinks you are a competitor
This is precisely the problem with the new BSL license. Whether your usage of Terraform complies with the license isn’t determined by the legal terms, but instead is entirely at the whim of HashiCorp. And they can change their mind at any time. It makes it impossible to build anything on top of Terraform.
I talk about that more here: https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-op...
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#23I 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 community governed non-profit foundations can do that.
Private corporations will put the bottom line first every single time. And in the case of investor funded enterprises, the bottom line is never ending exponential growth or bust.
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#24What's the cleanest way to pledge support as an individual, but without pledging as part of my company?
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#25Turns out the proliferation of open source was never because of "collaboration" or "community", it was actually just a result of zero interest rates and "growth".
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#26I 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 career, every hobbyist, every open source enthusiast, every vendor, etc. In the end, no matter which fork wins, everyone will be worse off: the community will be smaller and more splintered.
So we opted to ask HashiCorp do the right thing first. If they choose to do the right thing, we can avoid a fork, and avoid splintering the community. We still think that's the best option. But if that doesn't work, then a foundation + fork it is.
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#27I love it. The list of "pledged companies" is literally just a list of all the offenders that Hashicorp are trying to shake off.
These people have seriously contributed back to the Terraform community. Terraform doesn't have a test suite- Grunt made Terratest, as well as many other tools. These people have seriously contributed back to the ecosystem, in many ways beyond what Hashicorp has done. Beyond that, I know some of these companies tried to be contributors to Terraform itself but were ghosted by Hashicorp. At the same time there's only a…
Probably not difficult for these competitor organizations to fund an OpenTF team to hire some of these people away from HashiCorp and continue it on as FOSS either. I can't imagine Liam turning down .5M/year to do so.
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#28How exactly do the companies involved plan to fund a fork? It would require at minimum 3-4 full time engineers, and no one is going to do that work for free.
It’s also telling that this manifesto blithely suggests TF could become Apache 2, which is wholly untrue.
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#29How exactly do the companies involved plan to fund a fork? It would require at minimum 3-4 full time engineers, and no one is going to do that work for free. It’s also telling that this manifesto blithely suggests TF could become Apache 2, which is wholly untrue.
An earlier version of the manifesto contained pledged resources from each company (you can still find it in commit history). It totalled to ~10 full-time engineers just from founding orgs. It was removed to simplify adding their entries for new pledgees
Re: The OpenTF Manifesto
#30Part of me hopes a fork comes out of this. I mean maybe features like this PR[1] for local state file encryption can then finally get merged. [1] https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/pull/28603
I did see https://github.com/diggerhq/open-terraform but have no idea if it is related. And I’m sure there are others. What I’ll be interested to see with the forks is how they will practically be maintained. All the bug and security fixes that HashiCorp is writing can’t just be cherry-picked into these forks (I think?), so what exactly are they supposed to do? Update: and in the past hour this repo is gone.
> All the bug and security fixes that HashiCorp is writing can’t just be cherry-picked into these forks (I think?), so what exactly are they supposed to do?
Indeed, any fork will need to implement their own bug fixes.
Ideally they should do this "clean room" and not even look at the BSL'd code, to help defend against any accusations of copyright infringement.