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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 i

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 community governed non-profit foundations can do that. Private corporations will put the bottom line first every single time. And in the case of investor funded enterprises, the bottom line is never ending exponential growth or bust.

VectorLock 3y ago
I don't think you can just "fork it." Hashicorp already owns all that code because they make contributors sign it away to them.
- pxc 3y ago
  They can't retroactively take source code away from people who they already granted access to it under the MPL. The old code is still available under the MPL forever- even if they take down all of their own public copies of it, anyone with the old Terraform code is still free to upload their copy for the creation of a new fork. That's kinda the whole idea with these open-source licenses :)
  - VectorLock 3y ago
    I've heard some people discuss that the contribution agreement that Hashicorp makes people sign gives them the right to change the license for existing contributions, but I'm not a lawyer so I really couldn't say for certain either way.
    - linuxandrew 3y ago
      HashiCorp makes its external contributors sign a CLA to basically hand over the copyright. However the MPL and licensing in general is irrevocable. They have irrevocably licensed Terraform 1.5.5 under the MPL and an enterprise license (dual license). Anyone can use, modify and distribute version 1.5.5 under the terms of the MPL. Since HashiCorp retains full copyright they can release the next version under the BSL. Note that many free software projects (like Linux) don't have a CLA which makes relicensing impractical since every contributor would have to agree to it.
xinayder 3y ago
Why not get it under the umbrella of either the Linux Foundation or CNCF? Things like this and Ansible should be really kept under neutral companies and not companies like Red Hat and HashiCorp that have shown that all they care about open source is the free work they get from contributors.
brikis98 3y ago
The truth is that a fork hurts everyone. Imagine a future CTO trying to pick the IaC tools for their company. They see Terraform as an option, but then learn there are multiple forks, licensing questions, and a big battle happening in the community. What do they do? They are now way more likely to pick a different tool that is genuinely open source. The same is true of every dev considering where to build their career, every hobbyist, every open source enthusiast, every vendor, etc. In the end, no matter which fork wins, everyone will be worse off: the community will be smaller and more splintered. So we opted to ask HashiCorp do the right thing first. If they choose to do the right thing, we can avoid a fork, and avoid splintering the community. We still think that's the best option. But if that doesn't work, then a foundation + fork it is.
- hdaz0017 3y ago
  Hopefully it's not down to CTOs to be picking tools for their company but a process within DevOps/Engineering teams etc. Does anyone else see this as the Nagios Effect all over again, there must be lots to learn from history?
  - Atotalnoob 3y ago
    What is the nagios effect?
    - pxc 3y ago
      I didn't know either, so I did some Googling and found an old announcement[1] from 2009: > A group of leading Nagios protagonists including members of the Nagios Community Advisory board and creators of multiple Nagios Addons have launched Icinga – a fork of Nagios, the prevalent open source monitoring system. This independent project [is based upon a] broader developer community. [...] Icinga takes all the great features of Nagios and combines it with the feature requests and patches of the user community. It also looks like in 2014, Nagios centralized and appropriated a domain name and website used for hosting Nagios plugins, away from the community (its plugin developers)[2]: > In the past, the domain "nagios-plugins.org" pointed to a server maintained by us, the Nagios Plugins Development Team. The domain itself had been transferred to Nagios Enterprises a few years ago, but we had an agreement that the project would continue to be independently run by the actual plugin maintainers.¹ Yesterday, the DNS records were modified to point to web space controlled by Nagios Enterprises instead. This change was done without prior notice. > To make things worse, large parts of our web site were copied and are now served (with slight modifications²) by <http://nagios-plugins.org/ http://nagios-plugins.org/>. Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission. > This means we cannot use the name "Nagios Plugins" any longer. There's some previous discussion of those controversies on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9452013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9452013 From that article[3]: > [Icinga developer]: "Six months before the fork, there was a bit of unrest among Nagios' extension developers [...] Community patches went unapplied for a long time[.]" > [...] > Two years ago, more or less when the split happened, [Nagios author] was having problems resolving [trademark] issues with a company called "Netways". I'm still not sure what the effect is supposed to be tbh. -- 1: https://icinga.com/blog/2009/05/06/announcing-icinga/ https://icinga.com/blog/2009/05/06/announcing-icinga/ 2: https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-January/009417.html https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-Januar... 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20160314090137/http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/nagios_and_icinga https://web.archive.org/web/20160314090137/http://www.freeso...
fishnchips 3y ago
Marcin here, co-founder of Spacelift. Even though I strongly believe the OpenTF fork could open up incredible possibilities for the community (I could go on and on about it), it is an equivalent of a civil war. It doesn't serve the community and our only interest is in the continued strength of the community that we continue to build for. Based on my immense respect for what's been built under Hashi's umbrella I'd rather see a change of mind, and an opportunity to honor our pledge of resources (5 FTEs for 5 years) to the common rather than partisan cause.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  > it is an equivalent of a civil war. Why. It is open source. A fork should be no big deal, and definitely not a “civil war”. I think the community should be quicker to fork open source projects that are not serving the needs of the community. The corporations are trying to have the benefits of open source without the responsibility. Forking is a normal, acceptable part of open source and we should normalize it.
  - enneff 3y ago
    What would it mean to “normalise” forking? The costs of maintaining a fork are significant, and if one group of programmers are being funded to work on the project then it can be very difficult to fork a project in any meaningful way without significant resources behind it. Also IIUC most of the parties in this conversation are corporations. They’re all trying to enjoy the benefits of open source development for a variety of reasons.
    - lmm 3y ago
      > The costs of maintaining a fork are significant Why? If we have tooling or workflows that assume forks don't happen, maybe we can fix those. Forking should be cheap, easy and frequent.
      - waynesonfire 3y ago
        Right below your comment was another comment that started with, "The truth is that a fork hurts everyone." So, which is it?
candiddevmike 3y ago
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.
- tedivm 3y ago
  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.
  - dividedbyzero 3y ago
    Are they even able to unilaterally relicense third party providers?
    - throwaway1101z 3y ago
      Indirectly, by changing the license for the SDK.
- bickfordb 3y ago
  This is the interesting part of all of this. The meat of Terraform is in its provider ecosystem. Anyone can make a new frontend (or even fork the existing one?), get rid of all the warts, add the missing encryption features gated under enterprise and have a much better tool.
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
I totally agree. I do not think pleading with Hashicorp to reconsider will result in changing back the license Doing the Fork and showing it IS sustainable and has broad community support can encourage Hashicorp to make concessions. After taking this unilateral hostile step I do not think Hashicorp deserves the community trust and what industry needs is "Foundation Governed" Terraform like solution, whatever name this solution will have. You can see example in Confluenct which builds proprietary solutions around Kafka, where Kafka itself is Apache project.
nprateem 3y ago
It was never a public good.
- dbingham 3y ago
  > In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others. Any free open source product qualifies as a public good. It is free for all to use, and one person using it does not exclude anyone else from using.

VectorLock 3y ago

I don't think you can just "fork it." Hashicorp already owns all that code because they make contributors sign it away to them.

pxc 3y ago
They can't retroactively take source code away from people who they already granted access to it under the MPL. The old code is still available under the MPL forever- even if they take down all of their own public copies of it, anyone with the old Terraform code is still free to upload their copy for the creation of a new fork. That's kinda the whole idea with these open-source licenses :)
- VectorLock 3y ago
  I've heard some people discuss that the contribution agreement that Hashicorp makes people sign gives them the right to change the license for existing contributions, but I'm not a lawyer so I really couldn't say for certain either way.
  - linuxandrew 3y ago
    HashiCorp makes its external contributors sign a CLA to basically hand over the copyright. However the MPL and licensing in general is irrevocable. They have irrevocably licensed Terraform 1.5.5 under the MPL and an enterprise license (dual license). Anyone can use, modify and distribute version 1.5.5 under the terms of the MPL. Since HashiCorp retains full copyright they can release the next version under the BSL. Note that many free software projects (like Linux) don't have a CLA which makes relicensing impractical since every contributor would have to agree to it.

xinayder 3y ago

Why not get it under the umbrella of either the Linux Foundation or CNCF? Things like this and Ansible should be really kept under neutral companies and not companies like Red Hat and HashiCorp that have shown that all they care about open source is the free work they get from contributors.

brikis98 3y ago

The truth is that a fork hurts everyone. Imagine a future CTO trying to pick the IaC tools for their company. They see Terraform as an option, but then learn there are multiple forks, licensing questions, and a big battle happening in the community. What do they do? They are now way more likely to pick a different tool that is genuinely open source. The same is true of every dev considering where to build their career, every hobbyist, every open source enthusiast, every vendor, etc. In the end, no matter which fork wins, everyone will be worse off: the community will be smaller and more splintered. So we opted to ask HashiCorp do the right thing first. If they choose to do the right thing, we can avoid a fork, and avoid splintering the community. We still think that's the best option. But if that doesn't work, then a foundation + fork it is.

hdaz0017 3y ago
Hopefully it's not down to CTOs to be picking tools for their company but a process within DevOps/Engineering teams etc. Does anyone else see this as the Nagios Effect all over again, there must be lots to learn from history?
- Atotalnoob 3y ago
  What is the nagios effect?
  - pxc 3y ago
    I didn't know either, so I did some Googling and found an old announcement[1] from 2009: > A group of leading Nagios protagonists including members of the Nagios Community Advisory board and creators of multiple Nagios Addons have launched Icinga – a fork of Nagios, the prevalent open source monitoring system. This independent project [is based upon a] broader developer community. [...] Icinga takes all the great features of Nagios and combines it with the feature requests and patches of the user community. It also looks like in 2014, Nagios centralized and appropriated a domain name and website used for hosting Nagios plugins, away from the community (its plugin developers)[2]: > In the past, the domain "nagios-plugins.org" pointed to a server maintained by us, the Nagios Plugins Development Team. The domain itself had been transferred to Nagios Enterprises a few years ago, but we had an agreement that the project would continue to be independently run by the actual plugin maintainers.¹ Yesterday, the DNS records were modified to point to web space controlled by Nagios Enterprises instead. This change was done without prior notice. > To make things worse, large parts of our web site were copied and are now served (with slight modifications²) by <http://nagios-plugins.org/ http://nagios-plugins.org/>. Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission. > This means we cannot use the name "Nagios Plugins" any longer. There's some previous discussion of those controversies on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9452013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9452013 From that article[3]: > [Icinga developer]: "Six months before the fork, there was a bit of unrest among Nagios' extension developers [...] Community patches went unapplied for a long time[.]" > [...] > Two years ago, more or less when the split happened, [Nagios author] was having problems resolving [trademark] issues with a company called "Netways". I'm still not sure what the effect is supposed to be tbh. -- 1: https://icinga.com/blog/2009/05/06/announcing-icinga/ https://icinga.com/blog/2009/05/06/announcing-icinga/ 2: https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-January/009417.html https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-Januar... 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20160314090137/http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/nagios_and_icinga https://web.archive.org/web/20160314090137/http://www.freeso...

fishnchips 3y ago

Marcin here, co-founder of Spacelift. Even though I strongly believe the OpenTF fork could open up incredible possibilities for the community (I could go on and on about it), it is an equivalent of a civil war. It doesn't serve the community and our only interest is in the continued strength of the community that we continue to build for. Based on my immense respect for what's been built under Hashi's umbrella I'd rather see a change of mind, and an opportunity to honor our pledge of resources (5 FTEs for 5 years) to the common rather than partisan cause.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> it is an equivalent of a civil war. Why. It is open source. A fork should be no big deal, and definitely not a “civil war”. I think the community should be quicker to fork open source projects that are not serving the needs of the community. The corporations are trying to have the benefits of open source without the responsibility. Forking is a normal, acceptable part of open source and we should normalize it.
- enneff 3y ago
  What would it mean to “normalise” forking? The costs of maintaining a fork are significant, and if one group of programmers are being funded to work on the project then it can be very difficult to fork a project in any meaningful way without significant resources behind it. Also IIUC most of the parties in this conversation are corporations. They’re all trying to enjoy the benefits of open source development for a variety of reasons.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > The costs of maintaining a fork are significant Why? If we have tooling or workflows that assume forks don't happen, maybe we can fix those. Forking should be cheap, easy and frequent.
    - waynesonfire 3y ago
      Right below your comment was another comment that started with, "The truth is that a fork hurts everyone." So, which is it?

candiddevmike 3y ago

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.

tedivm 3y ago
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.
- dividedbyzero 3y ago
  Are they even able to unilaterally relicense third party providers?
  - throwaway1101z 3y ago
    Indirectly, by changing the license for the SDK.
bickfordb 3y ago
This is the interesting part of all of this. The meat of Terraform is in its provider ecosystem. Anyone can make a new frontend (or even fork the existing one?), get rid of all the warts, add the missing encryption features gated under enterprise and have a much better tool.

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

I totally agree. I do not think pleading with Hashicorp to reconsider will result in changing back the license Doing the Fork and showing it IS sustainable and has broad community support can encourage Hashicorp to make concessions. After taking this unilateral hostile step I do not think Hashicorp deserves the community trust and what industry needs is "Foundation Governed" Terraform like solution, whatever name this solution will have. You can see example in Confluenct which builds proprietary solutions around Kafka, where Kafka itself is Apache project.

nprateem 3y ago

It was never a public good.

dbingham 3y ago
> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others. Any free open source product qualifies as a public good. It is free for all to use, and one person using it does not exclude anyone else from using.