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The OpenTF Manifesto

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Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#31

Post by myroon5 »

igorzij wrote: post #29
jen20 wrote: post #28

How 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

Omitting commitment details may simplify pledges, but it also makes pledges almost meaningless. I'd take pledges much more seriously if they still had details

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#32

Post by fishnchips »

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…

Marcin here, co-founder of Spacelift.

Even though I strongly believe the OpenTF fork could open up incredible possibilities for the community (I could go on and on about it), it is an equivalent of a civil war. It doesn't serve the community and our only interest is in the continued strength of the community that we continue to build for.

Based on my immense respect for what's been built under Hashi's umbrella I'd rather see a change of mind, and an opportunity to honor our pledge of resources (5 FTEs for 5 years) to the common rather than partisan cause.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#33

Post by fishnchips »

jsiepkes wrote: post #4

Part 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

That would be one of the 1st things I'd love to see myself. Plus opening of "internal" to let folks build new stuff on top of Terraform elements.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#34

Post by marcinzm »

As I see it Hashicorp has failed to create a viable business model in an environment where there isn't unlimited perpetual VC money. Now they're at the stage of giving up and simply trying to shake down those who have managed to make better business models.

It's usually not a good idea to be near a company flailing like this since who knows what their next rent seeking approach will be. A company with nothing to lose is a dangerous partner to have.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#35

Post by tedivm »

fishnchips wrote: post #32
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…

Marcin here, co-founder of Spacelift. Even though I strongly believe the OpenTF fork could open up incredible possibilities for the community (I could go on and on about it), it is an equivalent of a civil war. It doesn't serve the community and our only interest is in the continued strength of the community that we continue to build for. Based on my immense respect for what's been built under Hashi's umbrella I'd ra…

I really appreciate that, and I do think it's right of you to at least make the attempt.

That being said, I don't expect this attempt to work and I fully believe that a fork is going to be inevitable. I also think a fork is an amazing opportunity to standardize the language and prioritize the features developers want.

It isn't just about the license, but the way that Hashicorp has maintained the Terraform project. The github insights show that they don't have nearly as many people working on it as I would expect, and most of them are split into also working on Terraform Cloud. At the same time they don't work with the community that well- there are open issues and pull requests that just get ignored as Hashicorp clearly doesn't see value in open source contributors. This isn't just a Terraform issue either- my company had to move off of nomad due to the lack of development and support (as well as broken features).

I have strong concerns about the future of these projects in general beyond just the licensing. An open foundation that had multiple companies involved would by definition need to find a way for those people to collaborate together, and once they do that it makes it easier for them to invite community collaboration. So while I do appreciate that it is a drastic step, I think it's one that would also be far better for the ecosystem and project as a whole.

That said, maybe this is the wake up call hashicorp needs to fix these problems. If you provide five FTEs that basically doubles the size of their Terraform development team (they have more people working on it than five, but those people are split into other projects), and once they start working with other groups maybe they'll work with the community more as well. I'm not holding my breath though.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#36

Post by fishnchips »

rjbwork wrote: post #27
tedivm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Marcin here, co-founder at Spacelift. We are open to fund 5 FTEs, feel free to reach out to us via the pledge page if you're interested in OpenTF becoming your full-time job.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#37

Post by cies »

aftbit wrote: post #17

>Imagine if the creators of Linux [] suddenly switched to a non-open-source license that only permitted non-competitive usage. Linux cannot even successfully switch from GPL2 to GPL3 because of the sheer number of contributors and the fact that not all of them have transferred their copyright ownership to any given organization. This patchwork of different copyright owners has historically been seen as a potential we…

I thought Linus and other believed GPLv2 was fine and the improvements of GPLv3 did not outweigh the potential problems introduced by it. It never came to a point where all authors were asked to agree, or sign away their ownership.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#38

Post by candiddevmike »

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…

Speaking of nuclear options, need to get the providers to pledge/follow the fork, maybe via some kind of API incompatibility. Terraform is useless if the providers don't work with it and only the fork. Focus on disrupting the ecosystem.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#39

Post by sausagefeet »

myroon5 wrote: post #31
igorzij wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Omitting commitment details may simplify pledges, but it also makes pledges almost meaningless. I'd take pledges much more seriously if they still had details

I am a co-founder of Terrateam and we have made a pledge for OpenTF. I understand where you are coming from, but right now it is difficult to know what exactly to pledge as we want a dialogue with HashiCorp on what they need as well, if they want to donate to a foundation.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#40

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

yabones wrote: post #25

Turns 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".

That's a possibility, but a collection of companies trying to drive FOSS even after the original company stops is a great argument that it is in fact a collaborative thing
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