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What HashiCorp’s license change means for our customers
- igorzij 3y agoWe are sort of competitors... kind of... but nevertheless feel free to switch to our MPL fork of Terraform :) https://github.com/diggerhq/open-terraform https://github.com/diggerhq/open-terraform
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoWhile I support you I'm not sure you can use "Teraform" in the name, even if it is Terraform.
- gray_-_wolf 3y agoSo, earthform? :)
- jakozaur 3y agoCosmoform, NexaForm, UltraForm, TerraCraft, PlanetaryForm, TerraNova, TerraMatrix, TerraBeyond, SpaceMold, AstroForm. Pick your favorite.
- thinkmassive 3y agoHow about simply: tf
- stronglikedan 3y agoCloudSeeder (or maybe just CloudSeed)
- hnlmorg 3y agoHashicorp have Terraform registered as a trademark[0] and they themselves have said they don't want the name used in a way that is confusing or suggests enforcement by Hashicorp[1]. So the GP definitely cannot call themselves "OpenTerraform". [0] https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4810:yja3vq.2.11 https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4810:yj... [1] https://www.hashicorp.com/brand https://www.hashicorp.com/brand
- ilc 3y agoGo with the GPL, without copyright assignment. There's real reasons to do this. It stops exactly what HashiCorp is doing, and you are likely giving HashiCorp the ability to take your code without giving back.
- candiddevmike 3y agoYou can't change the MPL code to GPL. You can change net-new files to GPL, but the existing files must remain MPL AFAIK (unless you're HashiCorp). IANAL
- remram 3y agoYes in fact Mozilla has a document about this specifically: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/combining-mpl-and-gpl/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/combining-mpl-and-gpl/ > When someone combines a file or files licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0 ("MPL") with a project licensed under the GNU General Public License or Lesser General Public Licenses ("(L)GPL"), the MPL's Section 3.3 allows distribution of the combined work (the "Larger Work") subject to the terms of both licenses, as long as certain conditions are met.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ilc 3y agoDistributing Solely Under the (L)GPL Once a file has been distributed under both the (L)GPL and the MPL, recipients of that file can later distribute it solely under the terms of the (L)GPL, in accordance with the terms of that license. If a project wishes to do this, and not to allow others to use their version of this file under the MPL, the project can indicate its decision by deleting the MPL headers described in Exhibit A of the license and replacing them with the standard notice recommended by the (L)GPL. Copyright notices indicating authorship of the file should be retained. ... So you combine with GPL code, and then, say "I don't want to use the MPL." Is this really so complicated? All updates to be done in the future are licensed under the GPL. The only firm that benefits from the MPL here is Hashicorp, which is the company that the fork is being done against. Fork it and be done... It isn't like the MPL code can integrate with the BSL code.
- jen20 3y agoWhile I’m sure you are earnest, you should probably stop right now. Forking a repo is not sufficient. You need to remove trademark infringement and anything which does not fall under the MPLv2 license - much like the (former) CentOS process for rebuilding RHEL. Should you ever distribute binaries, you also need to do a better job than HashiCorp of obeying the license terms of your dependencies around attribution. Finally, as someone who has actually done the job of core maintenance of Terraform, I suspect you are also vastly underestimating the amount of work involved. I just set a reminder to look at this fork in 3 months, I’d put money on it being dead.
- hluska 3y ago[flagged]
- jen20 3y agoWell, they appear NOT to know these things, since the name of the repo infringes a trademark, and infringing use of the logo is right in the middle of the README. “We’ll get to fixing that later” is not a valid response - this is clearly a minimal-effort attempt at a mindshare land grab from a competitor. Clicking the fork button is not “work” to be clear.
- topher200 3y agoIt didn't last 3 days -- the repo now 404s
- abledon 3y agoteraformos
- lijok 3y agoThis will be dead within 3 months. The naivety with which your company made this fork tells me all I need to know about Digger as a product.
- xrd 3y agoThis feels so similar to all the criticisms of the GPL that it would "infect" all software that touches it. But, in the reverse direction. Fascinating.
- pgeorgi 3y agoProprietary software is "viral", indeed. As soon as it's part of a combined work, the entire work devolves into proprietary software.
- pevey 3y ago> It’s also worth remembering that Terraform itself is built on top of multiple open source libraries and an open source ecosystem. Without the volunteer work of hundreds of unpaid individuals, HashiCorp products would not be successful, there would be no ecosystem, and the company would not exist. Hear, hear! (edited, thx) EDIT: Also, if you are contributing to open source, read carefully before submitting that PR. Do not contribute to projects that make you agree to a CLA. It's becoming more and more common for projects to include one or two lines in the README and that's it. All your code are belong to us. I don't know if that would hold up, but why contribute your time and effort?
- appleflaxen 3y agoAnd, if those projects had been licensed using AGPL, then Hashicorp would not be able to relicense this without negotiating a non-GPL license for themselves, first. I don't understand why GPL gets so much hate on HN.
- afiori 3y agodeploying AGPL software is complicated
- orthoxerox 3y agoNot really, just push the tarball with sources to nginx when you deploy a specific commit.
- sitzkrieg 3y agoyea this is definitely user friendly and realistic
- jen20 3y agoIf you make modifications, and deploy them in a way accessible to a given user, the changes must be made available to that user. I fail to see what is unrealistic about that, or indeed user-unfriendly, unless you consider the user to be the developer and not the person on the other end of the wire.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoParadoxically, AWS CDK License is still Apache-licensed: https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/blob/main/LICENSE So I lived to see when Amazon's offering is more open than Hashicorp's...
- paulgb 3y agoThis is basically an SDK for their proprietary CloudFormation product, though, right? It’s not like CloudFormation is open source.
- dmarinus 3y agothere's also cdk-tf (for terraform)
- amarshall 3y agoThe incentives are totally different because AWS doesn’t earn any direct revenue from AWS CDK. If someone makes some resold version of it, AWS still makes the same money from the infrastructure created.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoOf course. But this means the Hashicorp Cloud is either not technically attractive enough or too expensive if Hashicorp decided to make this move.
- dragonwriter 3y agoYes. The reason to seize a monopoly is to collect rents that you would not be able to under unrestricted competition.
- devsda 3y agoAre they really comparable? Can you use CDK to deploy to say Azure or GCP ? If it's limited only to AWS, even if someone offers a better version, Amazon still wins at the end of the day.
- adamc 3y agoTo me, seems to create incentives to donate effort to competing open source products. So it goes.
- geerlingguy 3y agoIs it okay to feel smug about not converting anything and everything infrastructure to Terraform right about now, like all the cloud gurus recommended?
- PhoenixReborn 3y agoI think the license change is a pretty bad reason to feel smug - unless you are building a competitor to or platform on top of Terraform. Spacelift is stuck in a weird place because of this, but most users won't be.
- candiddevmike 3y agoTechnically, according to HashiCorp's BSL, using GitHub Actions to apply Terraform could be a license violation.
- gray_-_wolf 3y agoI... do not think so? Yes, creating a commercial github action to apply terraform would, but any non-commercial and/or non-distributed one should be fine, no?
- candiddevmike 3y ago> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products. Using GitHub Actions to deploy your Terraform code (you becoming the third party) is competitive with HashiCorp's products. There is no delineation about commercialization. HashiCorp probably won't come after you, but to me it shows this wasn't really thought through or it's maliciously ambiguous.
- Nemo157 3y agoBut you are the second party, there is no third party involved when you use the software for yourself.
- MPSimmons 3y agoIt's hard to argue for building a product on top of another product that offers commercial support, at this point, since this is hardly the first company to do this. I'm not going to argue about the ethical considerations, but in terms of your engineering a product that may have the floor drop out from under it, _that_ doesn't ethically seem right.
- octref 3y agoI'm curious if HashiCorp changed their licenses to GPL/AGPL, will everyone be as frustrated?
- mhitza 3y agoNo. And any of the businesses that switched to the sources-available approach could have done just that before, and didn't.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoN=1, I'd be equally happy with any actual open source license.
- josephcsible 3y agoNo. Most people would have loved that. The only people who would have been frustrated by that are the ones who like making proprietary software.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoIs it just me or does this article not answer the question in the title, "What HashiCorp’s license change means for Spacelift customers," at all?
- RedShift1 3y agoThe answer is "our lawyers are looking into it".
- blitz_skull 3y ago> What we know for sure is that current versions of Terraform are, and will remain, unaffected, so there is no concern for your usage today.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoI mean, of course. This is obvious. What everyone wants to know is that is means for the future of Spacelift usage, which is painfully unanswered. The article ended so abruptly I wondered if there was an issue with my browser rendering the content.
- takeda 3y agoNot sure, what they will do. But if I was them, I would fork the latest MPL version of the code and license all their contributions as GPL.
- lijok 3y agoThe only thing it can mean is Spacelift have to license Terraform from Hashicorp, and pass the cost onto the customer, making them less price competitive than before. That's literally it. I'm confused by the moral high horsing PR release. Time to pay up.
- lacker 3y agoThe big question is whether they fork Terraform or not. Putting my cynical hat on, if I were running Hashicorp, I would be happy to give cheap licenses to anyone who wants one right now. The danger for Hashicorp is that people might fork Terraform and create a competitor. Right now, with the PR around the license change, is the most likely time for a fork to happen. It would be better to kill off competitors one by one, by raising prices slowly. Spacelift must know this is a danger, though. So it might be better to fork even if there's a cheap license on offer.
- fmeringdal 3y agoSeems like a good time to share my rewrite of Vault to Rust which contains a few enterprise features and is fully open source. It is still experimental and the architecture is a bit different from Vault. Feel free to try it out by following any of the examples! Repo: https://github.com/fmeringdal/covert https://github.com/fmeringdal/covert Examples: https://github.com/fmeringdal/covert/tree/main/examples https://github.com/fmeringdal/covert/tree/main/examples
- rirze 3y agoSeems like development has halted? Curious to know if it's still being worked on...
- fmeringdal 3y agoNot halted by any means. It currently relies on Litestream to do streaming replication, but unfortunately the author of Litestream removed streaming replication. I have been working on a Rust rewrite of Litestream which will be ready within a few weeks and will be incorporated into Covert. My focus on the Litestream rewrite is the reason there hasn't been any commits directly to the Covert repo the last months.
- benbjohnson 3y agoLitestream author here. The streaming replication was moved to a different project called LiteFS[1]. That may be a fit for you or, at the very least, it could be a helpful reference for your Rust port. [1]: https://github.com/superfly/litefs https://github.com/superfly/litefs
- fmeringdal 3y agoYeah, I haven't looked too deeply into LiteFS yet. I need the replication to work well with SQLCipher and the ability for the Covert server to completely control the master encryption key without passing it over any network or language barrier (this means I would have needed a Rust rewrite of Litestream even if it still supported streaming replication). Thanks a lot for releasing Litestream to the public. I have learned a ton about SQLite from reading the codebase!
- jakozaur 3y agoThe value of Terraform is not in progress of the language, but in many modules and rich ecosystem its support. HashiCorp first increased Terraform Cloud prices and now makes more moves to commercialise their products. For community it makes sense to fork, rebrand and keep open-source. This time under Apache foundation or CNCF. Well you do not need rapidly evolve Terraform, few small vendors and enthusiast would be able to do that.
- SteveNuts 3y ago> Well you do not need rapidly evolve Terraform, few small vendors and enthusiast would be able to do that. Probably true regarding entirely new features, but I think just keeping up with all the different API changes across the modules would be a massive amount of work in itself.
- jakozaur 3y agoDo not do blindly follow API changes in long term. Provide some tool to verify compatibility, but in general the goal is for open-source to be the standard, not HashiCorp flavour. Your goal is to convince the most popular Hashicorp providers that you are the standard and build the community.
- password4321 3y agoIncoming arbitrary API changes on the BSL version to guarantee plugin lock-in!
- count 3y agoThat work is still under MPL (Terraform Providers, which are mostly community maintained / developed). Hashi owns and is the primary developer of the terraform tool itself, but not the 'keeping track of all the different API changes' part.
- roschdal 3y agohttps://github.com/vaagrunt/vagrunt https://github.com/vaagrunt/vagrunt Check out my fork of Vagrant: Vagrunt! Still with the MIT open source license. Pull request welcome.
- mhitza 3y agoName is too similar, pick something less derivative.
- remram 3y agoIs there a problem with the name being similar, as long as it doesn't use the trademarked name? I understand how "open vagrant" or "vagrant reloaded" would be a violation, but I'm not sure if "vagrunt" would be, unless we think it's close enough to be confused with the original spelling?
- roschdal 3y agoThis is what ChatGPT said about the new name it suggested: "Vagrunt" is indeed a clever and suitable name that closely resembles "Vagrant" while changing just one character. It maintains the familiarity with the original name while also indicating a slight twist that makes it distinct for your fork of the application. Well done!
- omniglottal 3y agoThis is what else the same source said: Given that "vagrunt" and "vagrant" sound similar and, in your hypothetical, provide the same service, there's a good chance that using "vagrunt" could raise trademark concerns.
- orra 3y agoYes, trademark proceedings take similarity and likelihood of confusion into account. I'm not sure Hashicorp have a trademark here, but the names are awfully close. Think of the pronunciation: I am sure in plenty of localations the words are pronounced identically, let alone very similarly.
- paulgb 3y agoI am a fan of HashiCorp but as someone who tried to use Terraform Cloud, I can’t help but think they wouldn’t be having this problem if they had a more competitive cloud product. They have a huge (and well-deserved) advantage in distribution over companies like Spacelift because they own the toolchain. The fact that they are resorting to this tells you what you need to know about Terraform Cloud.
- n42 3y agoReally wanted Terraform Cloud to be any good. Ended up leaving last company, but was planning to just move everything to a BuildKite pipeline
- rjbwork 3y agoYeah, we gave it a shot, but really couldn't figure out where it provided any value over just running plan with an out file and apply with approvals in our normal CI/CD infra.
- thenaturalist 3y agoRight on the money. Such moves are the ultimate sign of weakness and inability to execute. I really do wonder if barring people from innovating around Terraform, such a strangle will just lead to the emergence of a Terraform replacement in the next years. Instead of buying spacelift or the competition and moving ahead, this solves... nothing?
- takeda 3y agoI'm not a fan of theirs and I'm puzzled why they have such following. I suspect they actively paying for influencers and people on social media to hype it. Their commercial offering, especially support is subpar to what I'm used to. I don't think they deserve the status they have.
- bmurphy1976 3y agoThat's a weird take. They had cloud ready quality tooling before everyone else. Consul, Vault, Terraform, Packer and Vagrant were all significantly ahead of the competition. That's an objectively impressive run. Those tools however were better early on when we were all managing our own EC2 instances. Most people are moving on from that in one way or another (fargate, kubernetes, lamba, etc.). They aren't as useful with the newer tech and Hashicorp doesn't have a cloud offering that's competitive. No moat so to speak. That's an unfortunate turn of events for them.
- ilc 3y agoI'm really bummed out by this. As someone who has worked on IAAS with terraform, I am not sure if I can recommend it anymore. I'll have to talk to my manager about our use of it to make sure we are "compatible" with the license, which is far too vague. ... Too bad. I liked terraform.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tehalex 3y agoI wonder what Google is going to do in this space - it seemed like terraform had been their de-facto infrastructure as code tool for GCP - they really need OSS or to build something first party.
- mdaniel 3y agoOr they could make Deployment Manager not just facepalm dumb: https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs/configuration/supported-resource-types?hl=en#apis_for_supported_resources https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs/configurati... But I'm guessing no one gets promoted for DX improvements, when there's AI editors to screenshot launch!1! I know CloudFormation gets shit upon, but for a lot of use cases it is very low drama, and (most important to me personally) it enables one-click deploys into customer accounts https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/cfn-console-create-stacks-quick-create-links.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui... without involving "first, open your terminal ..."
- josephcsible 3y agoI'd love to see them make a fork of the last FOSS version, just like Amazon forked ElasticSearch into OpenSearch.
- jen20 3y agoThis article is materially wrong in several respects (as one would expect had they been following Spacelift and their doublespeak around open source - especially from former “devrels”). This one particularly irks me though: > Can they do it? > Yes, they can. They required every contributor to Terraform to sign a CLA that allowed this. This is untrue, and only covers contributions since the CLA was added, many years after Terraform was started. I for one have never signed it.
- Cpoll 3y agoSo, is it wrong in the context of the question? Would they need to replace or clear all pre-CLA contributions? > Can they do it? Yes, they can.
- jen20 3y ago> Would they need to replace or clear all pre-CLA contributions? Yes, on a per-file basis.
- yencabulator 3y agoSo, does Hashicorp somehow have your permission to relicense Terraform as Business Source License, or are you saying they have violated your copyright on your contribution? https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/main/LICENSE
- matthewowen 3y agoIt’s hard for me to see what the future is for this “commercially supported open source” business model, particularly for infrastructure components like this. I start with the assumption that most companies want to use managed services for their infrastructure. This makes sense, because the marginal cost for (eg) AWS to provide the managed service is basically nothing over the cost of the underlying infrastructure (because at that scale you have to automate the management and can’t have a human in a loop for anything routine). But for the company using that service, the cost is non-zero since they likely don’t have that automation in place and have to have expensive humans do that work. So in a reasonably efficient market, managed infrastructure should be the correct financial decision (and I tend to think that the popularity of it implies that things are generally working that way). So if you want to use a managed service, it’s fine if you’re dealing with something that is (eg) MIT licensed because you can expect a healthy competitive market for running it as a managed service. But now you look at something like elasticsearch, and at this point what benefit do I have from using it over Amazon’s OpenSearch fork? I’m just as locked in if I use elastic since their license precludes anyone else from providing it as a managed service which is a fundamental requirement of my usage of the tool. Idk, I could be wrong! But I really don’t know what the path forward is for this model.
- dang 3y agoRecent and related: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306 - Aug 2023 (599 comments)
- oefrha 3y ago> They required every contributor to Terraform to sign a CLA that allowed this. Being legal does not make the move ethical or consistent with the ideals of open source software. No, it was MPL-2.0, which is permissive, so anyone including HashiCorp can start a BSL, or all right reserved, or whatever fork. Nothing to do with CLA. Doing whatever they want with it is entirely consistent with the ideals of a permissive license. If you don’t want people to do whatever they want with your code contributions, don’t contribute to a permissive project.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- remram 3y agoI don't think that's true. MPL is not that permissive. It clearly requires that every distribution in source code form or executable form come with the source code under MPL or a compatible license. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/#responsibilities https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/#responsibilities
- oefrha 3y agoYou’re right, I misremembered.
- dark-star 3y agoI'm pretty sure this claim is wrong: > Beyond Terraform 1.5.5, direct HashiCorp competitors will be unable to incorporate the source code or embed or distribute newer versions of Terraform. You can integrate Terraform, you just need a commercial license....
- ye-olde-sysrq 3y agoI'm sure hashicorp will be offering generous rates to their direct competitors.
- lijok 3y agoKnowing Hashicorp and their beautiful pricing models, the license fees are going to be, literally "oh idk, we'll let you know at the end of each month, ok?"
- comprev 3y agoI sense a Reddit API access pricing situation on the horizon. Paying for a license to embed their products in yours will be sky high thereby steering the end users to go straight for HashiCorp.
- hankchinaski 3y agoready for the whole industry to shift to a total new tool yet again, what will it be the hot new thing this time? pulumi?
- honkycat 3y agoPretty sure Pulumi is going to get slapped by this as well
- lijok 3y agoMy understanding is that Pulumi does not use Terraform
- leg100 3y agoIt uses the terraform providers under the hood. I don't know if the providers themselves are switching to the BSL license but hell, relying on Hashicorp to stick to an open source license for any of their projects is a liability from hereon in.
- arlongparker 3y agoUses terraform providers under the hood
- purpleidea 3y agoI don't think it's good news, but why is anyone surprised? Nobody wants to pay for open source. Companies want it for free, and individuals don't have enough luxury time to be able to do it themselves. Prove me wrong and help patch or fund https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and you'll have an even better replacement for terraform!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- olliej 3y agoToday in CLAs are bad and you should never agree to them.
- zackmorris 3y agoI'll just add my two cents: 1) I resonate with the spirit of the change, that too many companies are making vast sums of money on the backs of open source contributors who work largely for free 2) Changing open source licenses is just exactly the wrong way to redistribute wealth To me, these little jabs against conceptual simplicity undermine the spirit of human progress. They're like code smells. So for example, GPLv3 thinly veils DRM, which opens the door to monopoly, surveillance capitalism and big brother because it can never be made to work without infringing on individual freedom in some way. A better way to solve the problem of wealth inequality is to codify wealth redistribution into law. This is what taxes are. Rather than nickel and diming our psyches with licensing baggage, it's better for us as a whole to just feed some portion of our proceeds back into the system so that everyone else can eat too. This is the long game that we've been forfeiting since we put all of our chips into greed-is-good crony capitalism which started around 1980. I believe that stuff like the current Hollywood writers' strike is a canary in the coal mine for capitalist history. With the arrival of AI, our monetary system is going to collapse between (pulling numbers out of the air) 2030 and 2040. Money will fall in value to such a degree that a house will cost $1 million while the minimum wage is still $10 or less. Because robots can work for free, we can't. Enough with the personal responsibility dogma. It's time for systemic change. Edit: perhaps it's unclear exactly how GPLv3 gets too nosy: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/9m4n2g/linus_torvalds_says_gpl_v3_violates_everything/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/9m4n2g/lin... So I'm objecting to the BSL saying "this is open source unless you're our competitor". Edit 2: after thinking about this some more, I believe that in an information economy, code will become synonymous with the means of production. So UBI is an open source license that says a company can make unlimited money, as long as it gives some back to society. So there's no way to be anti-tax and pro-open source without cognitive dissonance.
- josephcsible 3y ago> GPLv3 thinly veils DRM What do you mean by this?
- zackmorris 3y agoHey good question. I was maybe conflating DRM with Tivoization here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization I feel that the original vision of most open source licenses was to allow anyone to sell open source software, with the condition that any changes be fed back to contributors. That self-limits how much profit anyone can make on the backs of others, because any value added eventually goes back into the system. This is how it worked back in the Red Hat Linux days. But today it's impractical to modify the software on locked devices running open source software, like cell phones. And we have video game consoles whose software is notoriously difficult to modify because they run DRM, and their games built on open source software are also copy protected. And most open source software runs on web servers now, walled away from us and unsold, so that changes don't always get fed back into the system. Put all of this together, and I can't help but feel that the GPL protects the DRM status quo. That may not have been intentional, but here we are. I view any restriction or even inconvenience on the user (where jailbreaked devices work better), or dictating what users can do with their software or devices, as DRM. That stuff should never be allowed to use open source software. And even linking to GPL code can infect non-GPL software with the GPL license, forcing users to decide if they want to use the LGPL instead. I find this distinction so exhausting to reason about and unnecessarily open to legal challenge that I usually avoid the (L)GPL altogether. I would have preferred to see a license derived from MIT with a new clause that says if you sell or distribute the software in a locked device, then any changes must be fed back to developers. But maybe GPLv3 is as close as we can get. And it still doesn't solve the problem of open source software locked behind web servers. But maybe it's important to preserve the freedom to do that, as Linus Torvalds said in that video: that it's none of our business what people do with our software (<- as long as they don't sell a modified version without feeding changes back). And admittedly, IANAL so I might be reading this all wrong. Here are the best links I could find: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html https://www.ifross.org/?q=en/what-difference-between-gplv2-and-gplv3 https://www.ifross.org/?q=en/what-difference-between-gplv2-a... https://lwn.net/Articles/200651/ https://lwn.net/Articles/200651/ https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynami...
- hintymad 3y agoAll the more reason for companies to choose software that a governance body owns, such as Apache and CNCF. A trajectory question: how much has Hashi been steering Terraform? Given that companies, especially those who offer Terraform as a product, have been using Terraform for so many years, they should have enough expertise to develop on the current version of Terraform without upgrading to the ones with BSL. Of course, sadly Terraform as a single product would diverge into many variants.
- josephcsible 3y agoA governance body isn't the right solution. The right solution is what the Linux kernel did: copyleft with no CLA and tons of external contributors.
- hintymad 3y agoI'd assume that many authors would not start with copyleft? So, as users of the OSS, we need to choose the ones that have a high chance of staying open.
- time0ut 3y agoI am actually really sad about how bad HashiCorp has dropped the ball. I'm a huge fan of theirs and Mitchell's in particular (not that this reflects on him really). Their plans for monetization are just so uninspired. They absolutely deserve to make money. I want them to. I want them to stick around and lift the rest of the industry (even if just a little). Improving the developer experience around Terraform is worthwhile, but just not that valuable. The experience is already good enough. I write Terraform daily. Its weird sometimes, but fine once you get used to it. Never been impressed with Terraform Cloud the times I've tried it. The open source ecosystem is a little wild west sometimes, but great overall. I wish they'd looked at building something higher order on top of it. Imagine if their premium offering abstracted Terraform away entirely. With their technical expertise they could build a platform where you built infrastructure like Legos. Eliminate the need to write Terraform. Reduce the need to understand the nuances of the cloud providers and any other provider they choose to support. Provide premium options that have certain compliance guarantees. If done well, this could print money. I'm sure there are tons of other things they could do that'd have companies begging them to take their money. What is happening?
- nijave 3y agoWeaveworks Terraform Controller for Kubernetes has been pretty good as a "run Terraform for you" tool. Of course you now need Kubernetes but you could just throw it in a basic, managed cluster that only runs that component.
- jeremyjh 3y ago> Of course you now need Kubernetes but you could just throw it in a basic, managed cluster that only runs that component. What a time to be alive.
- ergonaught 3y agoYet another confusion between open source project and open source product. Ex: > Nobody is accusing GitHub of exploiting the Git ecosystem. Because git is not an open source product. It is an open source project. Open source projects tend toward "free software". Open source products do not. Which side of that you think is being "bad" depends on what you value, I guess. Many of these shenanigans would probably not occur if the giants with billions in revenue who got there through the use of open source products would make relevant financial contributions to the companies behind the open source products. (Nevermind supporting the open source projects, too.)
- nrmitchi 3y agoHashicorp updating the Vault terms so people don't "docker run vault" and run a competing service. Sure. I get it. Hashicorp changing the Terraform terms.... absolute dick move. Terraform is not an open souce service; it's a library. You can't just "clone and run as service" when it comes to terraform.
- josephcsible 3y ago> They required every contributor to Terraform to sign a CLA that allowed this. This is your reminder that you shouldn't make nontrivial contributions to projects that require CLAs like theirs. Instead, find or create a copyleft fork without one and contribute there instead.
- takeda 3y agoI would agree, to not make any contributions. First, small contributing with many people still add up to a lot. Second, is that you typically only need to sign it once, and you might later even forget that you signed it wham making some small contribution and don't own any copyright.
- zxcvbn4038 3y agoThe problem with hashicorp IMO is that all of their pricing is apparently targeted at hedge funds and oil sheiks. I would like to buy support from them but I don’t have $30k/month to do that. I would like to move to a paid tier but that’s another $7k plus change a month. At that pricing level it makes more sense to build rather then buy. Compare that with AWS’s cloudformation. AWS support has a hefty price tag also but it includes every service including cloudformation.
- nikolay 3y agoHashiCorp does not have the capacity to maintain the ecosystem on their own. In fact, Terraform is kinda stuck for years, because only a handful of people work on it - others are too busy maintaining AWS, Google, and Azure providers - I believe companies pay them to do so. You could look at the years-old issue about having dynamic providers or changing the syntax of count - years of discussions, tons of developers complaining about it, and nothing except lame excuses that it's hard to implement those or that the lead is not accepting anybody else's vision. Anyway, nobody will use Terraform if it only supports the 3 major cloud providers! The beauty comes with the GitHub provider, maintained by GitHub, with the PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ providers, maintained by a solo developer, the MySQL, Cloudflare, Opsgenie, Pagerduty, and tons of others, not touched by HashiCorp. Those third parties do this, because of the open nature of Terraform. Now that HashiCorp is changing its model, because it's unable to sustain its business due to its high TFC pricing that doesn't even support its own CDKTF, I suspect a fork may happen, or Terraform itself could be reimplemented with better core than the current one, which is maintained by a couple of developers. Terraform is a huge missed potential and it has so many limitations like not being able to use variables in a bunch of places, the orchestration with depends_on being so limited, the unstable chaining of resource outputs to provider configuration, etc.