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The OpenTF Manifesto

opentf.org

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Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#41

Post by tedivm »

candiddevmike wrote: post #38
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.

Hashicorp left the provider frameworks under the original licenses, probably because they don't want to scare provider developers off. So for now both Terraform and a potential fork can continue sharing the same providers without issue.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#42

Post by tedivm »

marcinzm wrote: post #34

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…

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 prices up. It's a self inflicted wound, and instead of trying to fix it they just keep making it worse.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#44

Post by lijok »

tedivm wrote: post #15
lijok wrote: post #6

I 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…

Gruntwork is the only one of these companies that I genuinely cannot understand Hashicorp having any beef with.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#45

Post by tedivm »

fishnchips wrote: post #36
rjbwork wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the first time I've been disappointed that I really like my current job, as that sounds like it would be pretty awesome.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#46

Post by tedivm »

theowawayhs wrote: post #43

Once a prolific commentator, Mitchell Hashimoto has gone quiet here for over 50 days now. His GitHub activity seem to indicate he is now focused on the Zig programming language.

He doesn't work at Hashicorp anymore, and even quit the board. Since the company is public he could have just completely cashed out at this point (and I wouldn't blame him for it).

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#47

Post by jen20 »

tedivm wrote: post #15
lijok wrote: post #6

I 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…

> Terraform doesn't have a test suite

Patently false. Terraform has had an excellent test suite since 2014.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#48

Post by marcinzm »

tedivm wrote: post #42
marcinzm wrote: post #34

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…

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…

Definitely, the fact they're rent seeking against similar small companies clearly shows that. Sad that rather than looking inward to improve themselves they've decided to just attack others.

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#49

Post by tedivm »

jen20 wrote: post #47
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…

> Terraform doesn't have a test suite Patently false. Terraform has had an excellent test suite since 2014.

Sorry, this may be a miscommunication. Terraform itself has a test suite, yeah, but it doesn't have a testing framework that users of the language can use to test their own code.

To make a python metaphor, if cpython had a testing suite but pytest didn't exist then people wouldn't be able to test their own python code. That's kind of the situation with Terraform right now- you can't test your code using just the Terraform tools, you have to rely on Terratest which was written by Gruntwork. Hashicorp has spent years relying on the open source community to fill those gaps, which Gruntwork has done very nicely.

Hashicorp even recommends Terratest for testing: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/testing-hashicorp-terraform

Re: The OpenTF Manifesto

#50

Post by brikis98 »

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

We just moved to a table format for pledges and brought back the commitments so you can see them: https://opentf.org/
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