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> As a result, we believe commercial open source models need to evolve for the ecosystem to continue providing open, freely available software. To imply that a

> As a result, we believe commercial open source models need to evolve for the ecosystem to continue providing open, freely available software. To imply that a non-open-source license like the BUSL is part of such an evolution of "open source" models (commercial or otherwise) betrays either severe confusion or a deliberate attempt to mislead. Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp?

jrsdav 3y ago
I haven't looked to see what licenses are involved, but Pulumi makes liberal use of Terraform providers[1]. And I would definitely consider them to be a Hashicorp competitor. [1]: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/vs/terraform/#:~:text=Using%20Terraform%20Providers,Providers%20ecosystem%20using%20Pulumi%20programs https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/vs/terraform/#:~:text=U.... > Pulumi is able to adapt any Terraform Provider for use with Pulumi, enabling management of any infrastructure supported by the Terraform Providers ecosystem using Pulumi programs.
- reilly3000 3y ago
  They used to do that but now also have their own providers created by API catalog introspection.
  - arianvanp 3y ago
    Which terraform then copied with the AWS Native provider...
- arianvanp 3y ago
  But they don't out-compete them in any shape or form. I'd call it healthy competition. Pulumi made Hashicorp build Terraform CDK. Which is a great result. And the only reason Hashicorp was able to build CDK quickly is because they built it on top of Amazon's open source Amazon CDK. Another competitor.
  - manojlds 3y ago
    Calling Amazon a competitor because they have CDK is ridiculous.
    - deadbunny 3y ago
      Amazon is a competitor due to CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, however many ways to run containers there are now...
      - hughesjj 3y ago
        And SAM, and controltower, and of course the aforementioned cdk
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      Not really. The big question in infra land at our company these days is terraform vs cdk vs pulumi.
    - arianvanp 3y ago
      Could you be more constructive than just saying it's ridiculous? If you're an Amazon shop CDK/CloudFormation definitely is a competitor. Also Terraform now directly integrates with CDK. So apparently Hashicorp felt the heat . Looks like competition to me.
- yellowapple 3y ago
  TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs - and the vast majority ain't even developed by Hashicorp in the first place. If Pulumi - another open-source infra-as-code tool (that ain't even a fork of any Hashicorp product AFAICT) - is really the thing scaring Hashicorp away from open source, then that doesn't really do Hashicorp any favors here.
  - quacker 3y ago
    > TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor.
    - yellowapple 3y ago
      > If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Because that would be a waste of time unless there's some specific case where an existing provider is insufficient. > Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor. Pulumi itself is free software, just like Terraform was (and hopefully still is). There is literally nothing stopping Hashicorp from doing the exact same thing in the opposite direction.
      - quacker 3y ago
        Are you pretending they aren't a competitor profiting off that work though? Pulumi is free, except you pay for the features that aren't free: https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/ https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/. So, Pulumi has grown their directly competing product partially on top of the Terraform ecosystem - and I'd argue they'd be half as successful without reusing Terraform providers - and make money off of that product. It's at least understandable to me that Hashicorp doesn't like this.
        lijok 3y ago
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
> Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp? Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects.
- yellowapple 3y ago
  > Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. That nobody has tried suggests paranoia at best. > Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects. The AGPL exists and already fully addresses that.
  - not_a_bot2890 3y ago
    > That nobody has tried suggests paranoia at best. That's hardly paranoia. Why wait until you need to change it under pressure from one of the big CSPs (a la Elastic/AWS)? It is proactive at best.
    - yellowapple 3y ago
      AWS in particular already has its own competing services that predate or otherwise do not derive from Hashicorp's offerings (CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, etc.). Same with pretty much every other major cloud provider. The whole point of going with Vault or Consul or Terraform or what have you is to not tie oneself to a particular provider's offerings. Put simply: Hashicorp's target market for a given product is largely not going to be interested in a cloud provider's locked-down equivalent, and a cloud provider is not going to be interested in deprecating its own tightly-integrated product in favor of customizing some third-party offering. And again: if this was a legitimate fear, then the AGPL already fully addresses it.
  - gardenfelder 3y ago
    I'm thinking that AGPL is, indeed, the Ebola of viral licenses, but it does not cover the case where a large cloud vendor simply takes an AGPL-licensed product and offers it as a cloud service. AGPL does not cover that case. Nothing the cloud vendor does challenges any of the AGPL's terms. The cloud vendor issue is license agnostic. ElasticSearch comes to mind. For the AGPL side, MongoDB and Neo4J come to mind. Recall that AGPL came into play by way of a hole in the GPL terms, the one where you can modify a GPL codebase but you don't have to say anything unless you publish it. GPL was weak in therms of the definition of "publish". AGPL closed that hole. But, that hole only becomes toxic the moment you modify the code or plug proprietary stuff into it. Cloud vendors don't do that.
jen20 3y ago
Pulumi is the product that comes to mind immediately. Then things like env0, SpaceLift etc at the service end.
madeofpalk 3y ago
ctrl+f for "open source", and note where they stop using it. Note that they describe this change to maintain "open, freely available products", not open source. I think they're being more honest than others in not saying that changing their license is not to remain "open source". It's evident they know the pushback they would get from calling this "open source".
reilly3000 3y ago
I think Upbound’s Crossplane is the best positioned here. It’s an easy migration path and far more sane way to manage state.
- swyx 3y ago
  could you say more about what hashicorp products Crossplane compares to/or doesnt?
  - reilly3000 3y ago
    Sure, Crossplane leverages the K8s control plane for managing desired state for systems outside of the kubernetes cluster. It functions in a very similar fashion to terraform but it’s storing its own state in etcd instead of another state store. That makes GitOps + Crossplane play really nicely together and avoid the extra complexity that happens with terraform apply operations. They have a terraform wrapper provider for importing existing config and state. It’s really nice to have infra and apps flow through the same pipes.
    - swyx 3y ago
      oh wow, wonderfully explained. it feels like crossplane might be a terraform killer then, assuming k8s has won, which it seems to have.
ec109685 3y ago
Fly.io was built off of nomad for a while. That wouldn’t be allowed in this new world.
- LVB 3y ago
  Why not? What part of Fly.io is competing with any HashiCorp products?
  - growse 3y ago
    I mean, they allow you to create a manifest that then auto provisions some infrastructure, so... Shrug I'm being half-serious. Of course the point is that "competing" is deliberately very poorly defined, and it's entirely on the whim of hashicorp to decide whether or not you're competing and then impose a lot of legal costs on you. It's a racket.

jrsdav 3y ago

I haven't looked to see what licenses are involved, but Pulumi makes liberal use of Terraform providers[1]. And I would definitely consider them to be a Hashicorp competitor. [1]: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/vs/terraform/#:~:text=Using%20Terraform%20Providers,Providers%20ecosystem%20using%20Pulumi%20programs https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/vs/terraform/#:~:text=U.... > Pulumi is able to adapt any Terraform Provider for use with Pulumi, enabling management of any infrastructure supported by the Terraform Providers ecosystem using Pulumi programs.

reilly3000 3y ago
They used to do that but now also have their own providers created by API catalog introspection.
- arianvanp 3y ago
  Which terraform then copied with the AWS Native provider...
arianvanp 3y ago
But they don't out-compete them in any shape or form. I'd call it healthy competition. Pulumi made Hashicorp build Terraform CDK. Which is a great result. And the only reason Hashicorp was able to build CDK quickly is because they built it on top of Amazon's open source Amazon CDK. Another competitor.
- manojlds 3y ago
  Calling Amazon a competitor because they have CDK is ridiculous.
  - deadbunny 3y ago
    Amazon is a competitor due to CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, however many ways to run containers there are now...
    - hughesjj 3y ago
      And SAM, and controltower, and of course the aforementioned cdk
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Not really. The big question in infra land at our company these days is terraform vs cdk vs pulumi.
  - arianvanp 3y ago
    Could you be more constructive than just saying it's ridiculous? If you're an Amazon shop CDK/CloudFormation definitely is a competitor. Also Terraform now directly integrates with CDK. So apparently Hashicorp felt the heat . Looks like competition to me.
yellowapple 3y ago
TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs - and the vast majority ain't even developed by Hashicorp in the first place. If Pulumi - another open-source infra-as-code tool (that ain't even a fork of any Hashicorp product AFAICT) - is really the thing scaring Hashicorp away from open source, then that doesn't really do Hashicorp any favors here.
- quacker 3y ago
  > TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor.
  - yellowapple 3y ago
    > If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Because that would be a waste of time unless there's some specific case where an existing provider is insufficient. > Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor. Pulumi itself is free software, just like Terraform was (and hopefully still is). There is literally nothing stopping Hashicorp from doing the exact same thing in the opposite direction.
    - quacker 3y ago
      Are you pretending they aren't a competitor profiting off that work though? Pulumi is free, except you pay for the features that aren't free: https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/ https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/. So, Pulumi has grown their directly competing product partially on top of the Terraform ecosystem - and I'd argue they'd be half as successful without reusing Terraform providers - and make money off of that product. It's at least understandable to me that Hashicorp doesn't like this.
      - lijok 3y ago

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago

> Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp? Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects.

yellowapple 3y ago
> Just because nobody has tried yet doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen. That nobody has tried suggests paranoia at best. > Companies are doing this precisely because companies like Amazon abuse FOSS licenses to stand up their own hosted versions of open source projects. The AGPL exists and already fully addresses that.
- not_a_bot2890 3y ago
  > That nobody has tried suggests paranoia at best. That's hardly paranoia. Why wait until you need to change it under pressure from one of the big CSPs (a la Elastic/AWS)? It is proactive at best.
  - yellowapple 3y ago
    AWS in particular already has its own competing services that predate or otherwise do not derive from Hashicorp's offerings (CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, etc.). Same with pretty much every other major cloud provider. The whole point of going with Vault or Consul or Terraform or what have you is to not tie oneself to a particular provider's offerings. Put simply: Hashicorp's target market for a given product is largely not going to be interested in a cloud provider's locked-down equivalent, and a cloud provider is not going to be interested in deprecating its own tightly-integrated product in favor of customizing some third-party offering. And again: if this was a legitimate fear, then the AGPL already fully addresses it.
- gardenfelder 3y ago
  I'm thinking that AGPL is, indeed, the Ebola of viral licenses, but it does not cover the case where a large cloud vendor simply takes an AGPL-licensed product and offers it as a cloud service. AGPL does not cover that case. Nothing the cloud vendor does challenges any of the AGPL's terms. The cloud vendor issue is license agnostic. ElasticSearch comes to mind. For the AGPL side, MongoDB and Neo4J come to mind. Recall that AGPL came into play by way of a hole in the GPL terms, the one where you can modify a GPL codebase but you don't have to say anything unless you publish it. GPL was weak in therms of the definition of "publish". AGPL closed that hole. But, that hole only becomes toxic the moment you modify the code or plug proprietary stuff into it. Cloud vendors don't do that.

jen20 3y ago

Pulumi is the product that comes to mind immediately. Then things like env0, SpaceLift etc at the service end.

madeofpalk 3y ago

ctrl+f for "open source", and note where they stop using it. Note that they describe this change to maintain "open, freely available products", not open source. I think they're being more honest than others in not saying that changing their license is not to remain "open source". It's evident they know the pushback they would get from calling this "open source".

reilly3000 3y ago

I think Upbound’s Crossplane is the best positioned here. It’s an easy migration path and far more sane way to manage state.

swyx 3y ago
could you say more about what hashicorp products Crossplane compares to/or doesnt?
- reilly3000 3y ago
  Sure, Crossplane leverages the K8s control plane for managing desired state for systems outside of the kubernetes cluster. It functions in a very similar fashion to terraform but it’s storing its own state in etcd instead of another state store. That makes GitOps + Crossplane play really nicely together and avoid the extra complexity that happens with terraform apply operations. They have a terraform wrapper provider for importing existing config and state. It’s really nice to have infra and apps flow through the same pipes.
  - swyx 3y ago
    oh wow, wonderfully explained. it feels like crossplane might be a terraform killer then, assuming k8s has won, which it seems to have.

ec109685 3y ago

Fly.io was built off of nomad for a while. That wouldn’t be allowed in this new world.

LVB 3y ago
Why not? What part of Fly.io is competing with any HashiCorp products?
- growse 3y ago
  I mean, they allow you to create a manifest that then auto provisions some infrastructure, so... Shrug I'm being half-serious. Of course the point is that "competing" is deliberately very poorly defined, and it's entirely on the whim of hashicorp to decide whether or not you're competing and then impose a lot of legal costs on you. It's a racket.