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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 an

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?
      - lmm 3y ago
        Currently forks are painful, because they aren't normalized i.e. our tools and workflows don't expect them. I'm saying rather than discouraging forks we should adapt our tools and workflows to expect them.
        ericb 3y ago
        Sure, tooling could be better. But the real work is all the hard work that goes into a fork. I've watched open forks die all the time--all it takes is no one to step up and do/pay for the work, which is basically the default, because it is in everyone's interest if someone else is the one to do that. I think that's really the crux of the problem--there are plenty of folks willing to maintain software for money, and a whole lot of people who'd rather it not cost money and if it does, not their money. If the tooling is better, who is going to maintain this?
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      I assume OP meant cost == community. That is the hard part of a fork.
kragen 3y ago
it's not war hashicorp has decided they don't want to contribute to open source any more they're totally within their rights to do so, and it doesn't harm anybody; it's not the equivalent of going around blowing up buildings, raping women, and napalming children. at most we can wish they had continued doing the beneficial things they were previously doing maybe they'll change their minds, as you say, but that's no reason for the community to sit around twiddling its thumbs hoping for such a change. what's important now is that the people who are still willing to cooperate can do so successfully, and that's what opentf is about that's even more obviously not the equivalent of going around blowing up buildings, raping women, and napalming children. it's very much the opposite, in fact it's unclear to me which of the parties you intend to accuse of doing the moral equivalent of burning innocent people alive en masse, but either way, maybe you should think about walking back that rhetoric a bit
- fishnchips 3y ago
  I apologize if I appeared to downplay the horror of actual war. I'm lucky to never have experienced it first-hand. I mainly wanted to focus on the "civil" than "war" aspect of the possible schism.
  - kragen 3y ago
    it's not a possible schism. hashicorp has clearly and unmistakably abandoned the open source community. conceivably they'll change their minds, but their communication doesn't have any ambiguity in it i have no idea what you could possibly mean by 'focus on the "civil"'. it's good that people are being civil to one another, isn't it? then why are you criticizing them?
    - tedivm 3y ago
      You're missing the point- the OpenTF group wants to mend the schism if possible, by getting Hashicorp to change their licensing back. If they immediately fork then that's not likely to happen, so they're attempting this first. I don't think it will work, but I think it's good of them to try.
jeffchao 3y ago
As a user and collaborator of TACOS, agreed that it could open up opportunities. Though I echo trade-offs (as in other replies) that it could start a civil war that makes it difficult for end users and collaborators -- reminds me of Python2 -> 3, Presto/Trino, and many other stories. Pledging resources is a great approach.
tedivm 3y ago
I really appreciate that, and I do think it's right of you to at least make the attempt. That being said, I don't expect this attempt to work and I fully believe that a fork is going to be inevitable. I also think a fork is an amazing opportunity to standardize the language and prioritize the features developers want. It isn't just about the license, but the way that Hashicorp has maintained the Terraform project. The github insights show that they don't have nearly as many people working on it as I would expect, and most of them are split into also working on Terraform Cloud. At the same time they don't work with the community that well- there are open issues and pull requests that just get ignored as Hashicorp clearly doesn't see value in open source contributors. This isn't just a Terraform issue either- my company had to move off of nomad due to the lack of development and support (as well as broken features). I have strong concerns about the future of these projects in general beyond just the licensing. An open foundation that had multiple companies involved would by definition need to find a way for those people to collaborate together, and once they do that it makes it easier for them to invite community collaboration. So while I do appreciate that it is a drastic step, I think it's one that would also be far better for the ecosystem and project as a whole. That said, maybe this is the wake up call hashicorp needs to fix these problems. If you provide five FTEs that basically doubles the size of their Terraform development team (they have more people working on it than five, but those people are split into other projects), and once they start working with other groups maybe they'll work with the community more as well. I'm not holding my breath though.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Smells like the end of Chef. Management doesn't understand how much it takes to maintain the open source project and is just pouring resources into sales and marketing and products that they can charge for, and don't see how that erodes goodwill and the technological foundation of the company.
  - miah_ 3y ago
    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 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.
busterarm 3y ago
Hashicorp isn't going to budge here. The same argument that you've made about Terraform being the underpinnings and needing to be open-sourced can be applied to their other important products like Vault, Consul and Nomad as well. The ecosystem of those three is plainly a direct competitor to Kubernetes which is open-source. There's really no move for them to make here. It's unfortunate.
- fishpen0 3y ago
  Tons of organizations run vault and consul as part of their k8s ecosystem so they don't directly compete. The vault CSI driver might be the single most installed CSI driver across all the orgs I've worked for
  - busterarm 3y ago
    You're completely missing it. If you are running Nomad as your orchestrator, because of the tight integrations you are almost certainly running vault for secrets and consul for service discovery/service mesh. The ecosystem of the three is the competitor to K8s. s/ someone who runs both ecosystems at scale.
    - twunde 3y ago
      While the Nomad stack is a direct competitor to k8s, Consul and Vault are both heavily used alongside k8s. In fact, Consul had features that were only for k8s the last time I checked
      - busterarm 3y ago
        [flagged]
        hdaz0017 3y ago
        There is a big difference though Terraform is the out and out winner in its market. All their other products are at best small x% share of a crowded market or dominated by another product.
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
Hi Marcin, I recognize you're in interesting position in Spacelift. Per your recent analyses you may not be impacted and in this case you probably do not want to pissoff Hashicorp folks :) In reality though force better be responded with force and showing Hashcorp what what was Terraform will be successful as Open Source project with or without them is best way to get them to reconsider.

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?
    - lmm 3y ago
      Currently forks are painful, because they aren't normalized i.e. our tools and workflows don't expect them. I'm saying rather than discouraging forks we should adapt our tools and workflows to expect them.
      - ericb 3y ago
        Sure, tooling could be better. But the real work is all the hard work that goes into a fork. I've watched open forks die all the time--all it takes is no one to step up and do/pay for the work, which is basically the default, because it is in everyone's interest if someone else is the one to do that. I think that's really the crux of the problem--there are plenty of folks willing to maintain software for money, and a whole lot of people who'd rather it not cost money and if it does, not their money. If the tooling is better, who is going to maintain this?
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    I assume OP meant cost == community. That is the hard part of a fork.

kragen 3y ago

it's not war hashicorp has decided they don't want to contribute to open source any more they're totally within their rights to do so, and it doesn't harm anybody; it's not the equivalent of going around blowing up buildings, raping women, and napalming children. at most we can wish they had continued doing the beneficial things they were previously doing maybe they'll change their minds, as you say, but that's no reason for the community to sit around twiddling its thumbs hoping for such a change. what's important now is that the people who are still willing to cooperate can do so successfully, and that's what opentf is about that's even more obviously not the equivalent of going around blowing up buildings, raping women, and napalming children. it's very much the opposite, in fact it's unclear to me which of the parties you intend to accuse of doing the moral equivalent of burning innocent people alive en masse, but either way, maybe you should think about walking back that rhetoric a bit

fishnchips 3y ago
I apologize if I appeared to downplay the horror of actual war. I'm lucky to never have experienced it first-hand. I mainly wanted to focus on the "civil" than "war" aspect of the possible schism.
- kragen 3y ago
  it's not a possible schism. hashicorp has clearly and unmistakably abandoned the open source community. conceivably they'll change their minds, but their communication doesn't have any ambiguity in it i have no idea what you could possibly mean by 'focus on the "civil"'. it's good that people are being civil to one another, isn't it? then why are you criticizing them?
  - tedivm 3y ago
    You're missing the point- the OpenTF group wants to mend the schism if possible, by getting Hashicorp to change their licensing back. If they immediately fork then that's not likely to happen, so they're attempting this first. I don't think it will work, but I think it's good of them to try.

jeffchao 3y ago

As a user and collaborator of TACOS, agreed that it could open up opportunities. Though I echo trade-offs (as in other replies) that it could start a civil war that makes it difficult for end users and collaborators -- reminds me of Python2 -> 3, Presto/Trino, and many other stories. Pledging resources is a great approach.

tedivm 3y ago

I really appreciate that, and I do think it's right of you to at least make the attempt. That being said, I don't expect this attempt to work and I fully believe that a fork is going to be inevitable. I also think a fork is an amazing opportunity to standardize the language and prioritize the features developers want. It isn't just about the license, but the way that Hashicorp has maintained the Terraform project. The github insights show that they don't have nearly as many people working on it as I would expect, and most of them are split into also working on Terraform Cloud. At the same time they don't work with the community that well- there are open issues and pull requests that just get ignored as Hashicorp clearly doesn't see value in open source contributors. This isn't just a Terraform issue either- my company had to move off of nomad due to the lack of development and support (as well as broken features). I have strong concerns about the future of these projects in general beyond just the licensing. An open foundation that had multiple companies involved would by definition need to find a way for those people to collaborate together, and once they do that it makes it easier for them to invite community collaboration. So while I do appreciate that it is a drastic step, I think it's one that would also be far better for the ecosystem and project as a whole. That said, maybe this is the wake up call hashicorp needs to fix these problems. If you provide five FTEs that basically doubles the size of their Terraform development team (they have more people working on it than five, but those people are split into other projects), and once they start working with other groups maybe they'll work with the community more as well. I'm not holding my breath though.

lamontcg 3y ago
Smells like the end of Chef. Management doesn't understand how much it takes to maintain the open source project and is just pouring resources into sales and marketing and products that they can charge for, and don't see how that erodes goodwill and the technological foundation of the company.
- miah_ 3y ago
  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 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.

busterarm 3y ago

Hashicorp isn't going to budge here. The same argument that you've made about Terraform being the underpinnings and needing to be open-sourced can be applied to their other important products like Vault, Consul and Nomad as well. The ecosystem of those three is plainly a direct competitor to Kubernetes which is open-source. There's really no move for them to make here. It's unfortunate.

fishpen0 3y ago
Tons of organizations run vault and consul as part of their k8s ecosystem so they don't directly compete. The vault CSI driver might be the single most installed CSI driver across all the orgs I've worked for
- busterarm 3y ago
  You're completely missing it. If you are running Nomad as your orchestrator, because of the tight integrations you are almost certainly running vault for secrets and consul for service discovery/service mesh. The ecosystem of the three is the competitor to K8s. s/ someone who runs both ecosystems at scale.
  - twunde 3y ago
    While the Nomad stack is a direct competitor to k8s, Consul and Vault are both heavily used alongside k8s. In fact, Consul had features that were only for k8s the last time I checked
    - busterarm 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - hdaz0017 3y ago
        There is a big difference though Terraform is the out and out winner in its market. All their other products are at best small x% share of a crowded market or dominated by another product.

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

Hi Marcin, I recognize you're in interesting position in Spacelift. Per your recent analyses you may not be impacted and in this case you probably do not want to pissoff Hashicorp folks :) In reality though force better be responded with force and showing Hashcorp what what was Terraform will be successful as Open Source project with or without them is best way to get them to reconsider.