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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 t

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...
  - hdaz0017 3y ago
    Nagios used to be only Open Source then they created the Enterprise version and left the open source core version lagging behind, it was forked a billion times or more :) creating the Nagios Effect. A lot of monitoring software / companies then removed / replaced the core of Nagios from their products.
denvrede 3y ago
The guys at Pulumi must be having a field day right now. It's exactly how you describe it for us. We're long overdue with an upgrade of our Terraform config from pre v1.0. We have to most likely re-write a big part of our HCL code, so why not try a competitor? With Vault however that's another story, I've yet to find another secrets management system that has a tight integration with Kubernetes, AWS and supports providers for things like Postgresql to have ephemeral database credentials.
- yellowapple 3y ago
  Someone else posted a list of Vault alternatives, multiple of which (AFAICT) check your boxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151218
  - denvrede 3y ago
    Most of them do the first two: integration with Kubernetes and AWS. Unfortunately short lived DB creds is not in any of those listed.
linuxdude314 3y ago
I doubt that’s what would happen if they could afford a license from Hashicorp. Avoiding proprietary licenses has its place but if you aren’t using terraform to build a product this really shouldn’t impact you much.
- aldarisbm 3y ago
  Shouldnt impact you much. _yet_
i_am_jl 3y ago
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? I truly believe that a CTO who sees Terraform as an option and who isn't scared off by the BSL, but then has all of these other concerns, exists only in fantasy.
- verdverm 3y ago
  Lots of people still using elastic, mongo, and redis. What's different about this one?
  - vosper 3y ago
    Just went with Elastic cloud after evaluating both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. It was an easy choice to stick with the incumbent/creator that I was familiar with. No complaints so far.
    - verdverm 3y ago
      We just went back to TF after giving Pulumi a try. Prefer declarative syntax for infra and more abuse of Yaml ("fn::..." here) is not what I'm after. We are working on wrapping TF in CUE since you can CUE->JSON->TF https://github.com/hofstadter-io/cuelm https://github.com/hofstadter-io/cuelm Many more CUE experiments are going on in the devops space
      - AaronFriel 3y ago
        Pulumi has a few languages other than YAML and Pulumi is declarative[1], and the programs you write are only as complex as you want them to be. This python program declares an S3 bucket and declares ten objects to exist in it. from pulumi_aws import s3 bucket = s3.Bucket('bucket') for i in range(10): s3.BucketObject( f'object-{i}', s3.BucketObjectArgs( bucket=bucket.id, key=str(i), ) ) Even so, Pulumi YAML has a "compiler" option, so if you want to write CUE or jsonnet[1], or other[2] languages, it definitely supports that. Disclaimer: I led the YAML project and added the compiler feature at the request of some folks internally looking for CUE support :) [1] https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumi-is-imperative-declarative-imperative/ https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumi-is-imperative-declarative... [2] https://www.pulumi.com/blog/extending-pulumi-languages-with-yaml-cue-jsonnet-rust/ https://www.pulumi.com/blog/extending-pulumi-languages-with-... [3] https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2022/05/04/deploying-kubernetes-clusters-in-absurd-languages https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2022/05/04/deploying-kubernetes...
Spivak 3y ago
I don't get this one, you pick OpenTerraform and get on with your life. It's the same with picking OpenSearch over Elastic. I can use the proprietary version that locks me into a single profit-seeking vendor and doesn't have community backing or the one run by a foundation made up of companies that use and are heavily invested in Terraform.
- eraser215 3y ago
  How dare a vendor come up with an idea, pay people to execute on that idea, and the gasp try to make money from it? Outrageous!
  - Spivak 3y ago
    How dare a vendor come up with an idea, pay people to execute on it, give it away for free to the world, acquire users and soak in all the community contributions from people who thought they were using and contributing to a public good, try and fail to indirectly monetize a hosted version because other people were better at it than them, then rug-pull out from under everyone and use copyright/government-stick to kill their competition because they can't compete on even terms. Then a group of people who are users of idea and actually making money off it with value-adds step up to maintain it as a community project ensuring that it stays open for everyone -- yeah those guys are the assholes. Terraform would have went nowhere if it wasn't OSS and Terraform would be nothing without its outside contributions that make up far more than the code of Terraform core itself. There's a trail of bodies to prove it. And you should love this, projects that are stewarded by its own users are incentivized to make it the best it can be instead of rejecting contributions because it competes with their cloud offering [1] [1] https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/9556 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/9556

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...
- hdaz0017 3y ago
  Nagios used to be only Open Source then they created the Enterprise version and left the open source core version lagging behind, it was forked a billion times or more :) creating the Nagios Effect. A lot of monitoring software / companies then removed / replaced the core of Nagios from their products.

denvrede 3y ago

The guys at Pulumi must be having a field day right now. It's exactly how you describe it for us. We're long overdue with an upgrade of our Terraform config from pre v1.0. We have to most likely re-write a big part of our HCL code, so why not try a competitor? With Vault however that's another story, I've yet to find another secrets management system that has a tight integration with Kubernetes, AWS and supports providers for things like Postgresql to have ephemeral database credentials.

yellowapple 3y ago
Someone else posted a list of Vault alternatives, multiple of which (AFAICT) check your boxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151218
- denvrede 3y ago
  Most of them do the first two: integration with Kubernetes and AWS. Unfortunately short lived DB creds is not in any of those listed.

linuxdude314 3y ago

I doubt that’s what would happen if they could afford a license from Hashicorp. Avoiding proprietary licenses has its place but if you aren’t using terraform to build a product this really shouldn’t impact you much.

aldarisbm 3y ago
Shouldnt impact you much. _yet_

i_am_jl 3y ago

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? I truly believe that a CTO who sees Terraform as an option and who isn't scared off by the BSL, but then has all of these other concerns, exists only in fantasy.

verdverm 3y ago
Lots of people still using elastic, mongo, and redis. What's different about this one?
- vosper 3y ago
  Just went with Elastic cloud after evaluating both Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. It was an easy choice to stick with the incumbent/creator that I was familiar with. No complaints so far.
  - verdverm 3y ago
    We just went back to TF after giving Pulumi a try. Prefer declarative syntax for infra and more abuse of Yaml ("fn::..." here) is not what I'm after. We are working on wrapping TF in CUE since you can CUE->JSON->TF https://github.com/hofstadter-io/cuelm https://github.com/hofstadter-io/cuelm Many more CUE experiments are going on in the devops space
    - AaronFriel 3y ago
      Pulumi has a few languages other than YAML and Pulumi is declarative[1], and the programs you write are only as complex as you want them to be. This python program declares an S3 bucket and declares ten objects to exist in it. from pulumi_aws import s3 bucket = s3.Bucket('bucket') for i in range(10): s3.BucketObject( f'object-{i}', s3.BucketObjectArgs( bucket=bucket.id, key=str(i), ) ) Even so, Pulumi YAML has a "compiler" option, so if you want to write CUE or jsonnet[1], or other[2] languages, it definitely supports that. Disclaimer: I led the YAML project and added the compiler feature at the request of some folks internally looking for CUE support :) [1] https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumi-is-imperative-declarative-imperative/ https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumi-is-imperative-declarative... [2] https://www.pulumi.com/blog/extending-pulumi-languages-with-yaml-cue-jsonnet-rust/ https://www.pulumi.com/blog/extending-pulumi-languages-with-... [3] https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2022/05/04/deploying-kubernetes-clusters-in-absurd-languages https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2022/05/04/deploying-kubernetes...

Spivak 3y ago

I don't get this one, you pick OpenTerraform and get on with your life. It's the same with picking OpenSearch over Elastic. I can use the proprietary version that locks me into a single profit-seeking vendor and doesn't have community backing or the one run by a foundation made up of companies that use and are heavily invested in Terraform.

eraser215 3y ago
How dare a vendor come up with an idea, pay people to execute on that idea, and the gasp try to make money from it? Outrageous!
- Spivak 3y ago
  How dare a vendor come up with an idea, pay people to execute on it, give it away for free to the world, acquire users and soak in all the community contributions from people who thought they were using and contributing to a public good, try and fail to indirectly monetize a hosted version because other people were better at it than them, then rug-pull out from under everyone and use copyright/government-stick to kill their competition because they can't compete on even terms. Then a group of people who are users of idea and actually making money off it with value-adds step up to maintain it as a community project ensuring that it stays open for everyone -- yeah those guys are the assholes. Terraform would have went nowhere if it wasn't OSS and Terraform would be nothing without its outside contributions that make up far more than the code of Terraform core itself. There's a trail of bodies to prove it. And you should love this, projects that are stewarded by its own users are incentivized to make it the best it can be instead of rejecting contributions because it competes with their cloud offering [1] [1] https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/9556 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/9556