The OpenTF Manifesto

That would be what I meant by legally prevented.

Torvalds considered the anti-TiVo clause to be changing the deal and he didn't want to do that, and there's no way in GPLv3 to opt-out of the clause[0].

This is less "locking down devices is a human right" and more him being angry that the FSF was trying to butt into his project's affairs. He's also similarly angry about "GNU/Linux" as it sounds an awful lot like Stallman just demanding everyone stick "GNU" onto the name of Linus's kernel project.

Anyway all of this is going to seem really quaint in 2027 when Broadcom gets sued under DMCA 1201 by a rogue kernel contributor for evading the Linux linker's license checks[1] and they have to hurriedly rewrite them out of the kernel and relicense anyway.

[0] Granting a blanket exception doesn't work because others can just remove the exception. "No further restrictions" is an ironclad law of copyleft.

[1] The Linux kernel checks the declared license of loaded modules and refuses to link non-GPL-compatible code against any kernel symbol not marked as a user-space equivalent. The reason why this works this way is because Linux ships under GPLv2 plus an exception that says user-space APIs don't trip copyleft, so you can legally load code built to those APIs into the kernel, but anything else might violate GPL.

Since this is enforcing an interpretation of the GPL, this is a DMCA 1201 technical protection measure. You absolutely could make a DMCA 1201 anticircumvention claim in court against a proprietary driver developer that tried to evade the checks. Though Linus usually just bans their modules in the next kernel revision since he's mainly worried about keeping proprietary modules from generating spurious bug reports in Linux. But the lawsuit is still possible, since they're on GPLv2. If they had relicensed to GPLv3, this wouldn't be an issue.

Long time YC reader here. Created an account just to make this comment: maybe this idea of a fork is a good thing. We maybe able to potentially explore developing HCL further. Develop further abstractions that are provider agnostic. At least for most common resources like instances, security groups etc.

Obviously there would be tradeoffs involved. But if we can cover the 80% situation, that would be a good start.

Well, here's the link to the post-mortem of said "horror" story on the Roblox blog:

https://blog.roblox.com/2022/01/roblox-return-to-service-10-...

TL;DR The outage was caused by (a) they enabled a new streaming feature in Consul under unusualy high read-and-write load, (b) the load conditions triggered a pathological issue in the third-party BoltDB system upon which Consul relies and (c) all of that was exacerbated by having one consul cluster supporting multiple workloads.

I'd use quotes to catalog this as a "horror" story, because this was clearly a very specific issue triggered by a specific and complex set of circumstances.

The blogpost also mentions that Roblox worked closely with Hashicorp engineers to mitigate the issue, and work towards structural solutions; the post also affirms their choice to manage their infra themselves rather then moving into a public cloud solution.

Sure, Kubernetes covers loads of territory. But there definitely are niches where products like Consul & Nomad do add value.

I also saw that parallel with Chef. I think its the story of all VC funded software that attempts to be "Open Source". For them, Open Source means "You can read the source code, and potentially fix a bug", for us, it means community, transparency, and fixing bugs beyond those your paying customer has.

I looked at github /chef/chef and github /inspec/inspec and its the same as it was shortly after I left. The only changes are from the one person who carried over after the sale to Progress, and the contracting team out of India, with dozens are unanswered queries and pull requests from the community.

What really ruffles my feathers was when they had us define oss-practices (https://github.com/chef/chef-oss-practices), clearly nobody outside our small team read (or understood) those words and goals. It feels like it was work to make us look better in OSS in order to bolster the company sale.