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OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

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Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#61

Post by gkapur »

alephnerd wrote: post #9

I know most HN commentators are thinking about Terraform, but I think this change was done with Consul and Vault in mind. Plenty of companies (including my employer) have been building fully monetized software using Consul and Vault under the hood and not paying them a dime. We're a company that's valued/market capped in the Billions btw and I know plenty of other large software companies doing the same thing.

Don’t think it’s targeted at Vault. Vault has APIs so in the enterprise, you can self host and a vendor can manage vault through the APIs. Terraform specifically is built CLI only in the OSS so you have to repackage the underlying binary and hence are subject to the license as a vendor.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#62

Post by linuxftw »

proxysna wrote: post #16
alephnerd wrote: post #9

I know most HN commentators are thinking about Terraform, but I think this change was done with Consul and Vault in mind. Plenty of companies (including my employer) have been building fully monetized software using Consul and Vault under the hood and not paying them a dime. We're a company that's valued/market capped in the Billions btw and I know plenty of other large software companies doing the same thing.

Yes, people underestimate how important consul and vault are in modern infra. There is no direct replacement for vault or consul in how versatile and powerful these tools are.

I definitely underestimate them because in my last 7 roles I haven't used either. I don't know how far back 'modern' goes, but 3 roles were over the last 24 months (just started a new role) and none of those roles the companies used consul or vault to manage anything.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#63

Post by linuxftw »

yebyen wrote: post #60
HtmlProgrammer wrote: post #18

How does this new license work in terms of either a bug is found in terraform post support date or a new feature is added to the Hashicorp version. Can the patch / new code be copied to this version without violating anything or does it have to be some sort of “clean room” patch where you only read the bug report and not the actual fix

I think appropriating code against the license would be a license violation. Whether it's a bug or a feature doesn't really make any difference. If it's not licensed for copying, then you can't copy it. You can't re-license it without permission. That's why they are saying it's not an "open source" license anymore – because it's not. Source available means just that. You can read it (say for the purpose of figuring o…

I think there's a compelling argument to be made for bug fixes and small changes being derivative works of the originally licensed open source software. As such, it's unlikely that the 'copyright' of those small changes would be able to stand on their own.

Perhaps 'derivative works' isn't the right term. I know there's some exceptions for copyright when there's 'one way' to do something, or something that substantially is not a creative work, such as a function that adds two numbers.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#64

Post by morgante »

alephnerd wrote: post #55
rubiquity wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you resell services that would be competing with Vault and Consul? If not I don’t see how this applies to your company’s product. Side note: I’m not defending the license change and generally think most of HashiCorp’s products are not that great.

You can't use BSL licensed products in production without paying the provider. Plenty of companies are using Vault and Consul in this manner.

That is not accurate. BSL does not prevent simply using the products, it prevents packaging them into a competing offering.

Review the FAQ here: https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#65

Post by alephnerd »

linuxftw wrote: post #62
proxysna wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people underestimate how important consul and vault are in modern infra. There is no direct replacement for vault or consul in how versatile and powerful these tools are.

I definitely underestimate them because in my last 7 roles I haven't used either. I don't know how far back 'modern' goes, but 3 roles were over the last 24 months (just started a new role) and none of those roles the companies used consul or vault to manage anything.

If you've ever done a credit card transaction or any form of dollar based transaction, it's using software directly built on top of Consul.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#66

Post by pachico »

Shares were going down for some time, env0 (Terraform Cloud competitor) just raised 35m from VC for a what seems to be a good product... Hashicorp did it's move. If there's a community behind, the fork will live and, who knows, maybe many will start using it instead of the original one. It's all up to the community and substantial sponsors, at this point.

I still think that the best way to compete is by having a more appealing product, thought, rather than changing licence. And I mean this for Hashicorp, Elastic, etc.

If you need to do this move is because you don't really succeed at having a better product, else you would just benefit from FOSS rather than it being a liability.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#67

Post by thenaturalist »

alephnerd wrote: post #26
robertlagrant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why they're having to make these moves. How much value have they given you vs how much have you paid? If the gap is too large, they have to start locking some things down.

Exactly this. Open Source software quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons because most organizations are unscrupulous. Look at how AWS destroyed the entire Elastic, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc ecosystems by abusing overly permissive licenses.

Strongly disagree with your point as you are comparing SaaS vendors who package these technologies under the hood with no immediate access provided to their customers, just as means to delivering a service with tech providers who were just blatantly packed by AWS and provided as identical technology.

There is a huuuuge difference between OP and your examples.

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#68

Post by igorzij »

cube2222 wrote: post #49
izalutski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah apologies we're in a little bubble here together with Spacelift, Scale, Env0 and Atlantis so starting to assume everyone knows the niche terminology lol Yeah so basically TACOS are ci-like tools / control planes for Terraform. The OG one being Terraform Cloud. The term TACOS was coined by Piotr Zaniewski here: https://itnext.io/spice-up-your-infrastructure-as-code-with-...

It's actually much older than that. I think it was coined by CloudPosse with this video: https://youtu.be/4MLBpBqZmpM (December 2020)

oh wow didn't know thanks!!

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#69

Post by igorzij »

darkwater wrote: post #58
igorzij wrote: post #2

Hashicorp switched Terraform from MPL to BSL yesterday. Many other companies did that in the past to prevent others taking their code and charging for running it as a managed service (eg Mongo, Elastic). With Hashi however, the server-side part was never open-source to start with. There was no such thing as "open-source Terraform Server". And now it seems that any commercial product that uses the Terraform language u…

IANAL but probably Hashicorp has some trademark over "Terraform" in this context. I don't know if it's 100% safe for you to call it "Open Terraform".

thanks! indeed, totally valid concern

Re: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

#70

Post by tetha »

alephnerd wrote: post #9

I know most HN commentators are thinking about Terraform, but I think this change was done with Consul and Vault in mind. Plenty of companies (including my employer) have been building fully monetized software using Consul and Vault under the hood and not paying them a dime. We're a company that's valued/market capped in the Billions btw and I know plenty of other large software companies doing the same thing.

On the other hand, we wanted to give them money to have a support contract, maybe some yearly architecture reviews or a call with a consultant to point us towards new features. We have similar agreements with e.g. AWS, we're looking at setting something like this up with a postgres consultancy. However, the smallest offering was solidly in the six figures a year. That put it into a very different investment process, the board got involved and you can all guess where it went from there.
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