4 ms·

As a regular end-user of Terraform, what difference does BSL vs MPL make to me? From reading this article it seems not very much? Perhaps I'm misreading this.

LinXitoW 3y ago
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but if I use TF in a Petstore-as-a-Service to provision new machines for my users, does that not count as embedding TF? So if HashiCorp decides to do Petstore-as-a-Service tomorrow, no matter how shitty the offering, no matter how insincere, even if it's just a single intern working on it, I would have to, overnight, rip TF out of my entire offering, no?
- yellowapple 3y ago
  Correct. That, or "negotiate" with HashiCorp for a commercial license.
brikis98 3y ago
It means that whether you can use Terraform at any future company you work for will be determined... by HashiCorp. That's because the BSL license is intentionally vague. What does "competing" mean? What does "hosting or embedding" mean? Who decides? In order to really know if you're a competitor, you have to reach out to HashiCorp (as the FAQ tells you to do). So whether your usage is valid is not controlled by the license terms, but is instead entirely at the whim of HashiCorp. So they switched from a permissive open source license to a HashiCorp decides license: they get to decide on a case by case basis now—and they can change their mind at any time. That is very shaky footing on which to build anything. And the legal team at every company you work for will have to take that into account before deciding you can or can't use Terraform. See https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-open-ab0b9ba65bca https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-op... for more info.
robbintt 3y ago
It will affect categories of business users (programmers) who currently embrace terraform: amazon, google, microsoft, oracle, alibaba cloud. Like it or not, cohorts of engineering organizations like the above (cloud providers) have a very outsized weight and already have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow. From the article: The license does not allow you to use Terraform if you meet both of the following conditions: You are building a product that is competitive with HashiCorp. You embed or host Terraform in your product. My $0.02: the management of hashicorp is following a stupid trend and should have thought about their customers more. It will come out to what lawyers think, I guess. Lawyers usually say no to things with poorly established precedent.
- cbo100 3y ago
  > have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow. Then why didn’t they “choose” to fund hashicorp yesterday and avoid this? As usual in OSS-goes-private events these all just sound like “keep building our critical infrastructure tool for free or we will go elsewhere”. What is hashicorp or any other company in their position to do? This is not sustainable.
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    > As usual in OSS-goes-private events these all just sound like “keep building our critical infrastructure tool for free or we will go elsewhere”. If Terraform was 100% developed by HashiCorp employees that would be fair description. It's more like "We're the only company allowed to make money off of the codebase you contributed to." > What is hashicorp or any other company in their position to do? I'd suggest paying developers to write proprietary code. That way they could just sell a product they fully own instead of having to pull this bullshit re-licensing of an open source codebase.
vrosas 3y ago
IANAL but it doesn’t seem like much, unless you’re planning on building a terraform-as-a-service company to compete directly with hashicorp. Honestly I’m not surprised given hashicorp’s enterprise offering are basically just… hosting the .tfstate file for you? I still can’t figure out what their upsell is.
- pknomad 3y ago
  Hosting the statefile in a secure way, state-locking, injecting the secrets so you're not keeping the secrets locally or in env var, and pre-built integration with other Hashicorp suite. I see the use case for it if you don't want to use a 3rd party or open source tool (Atlantis) but the pricing seems prohibitive.
pknomad 3y ago
Not much, right now. Long term? Possibly less adoption (teams may elect to go with Pulumi or some other alternatives), less 3rd party tooling available (what if Hashicorp decides your tool is their competitor?), etc. It seems very similar to the spat that community had with Red Hat with how 3rd party captures too much value from their own internal offering and leadership responds by changing the license model and makes things less open-source-y. Perhaps this will become the new normal for OSS/former OSS? IDK.
rst 3y ago
It depends on what you're using it for, and whether it competes with anything Hashicorp does -- or might do in the future. If you can guarantee that's "none", you're in the clear. But as the man said, prediction is hard, especially about the future.
yonixwm 3y ago
I think you will be affected by the bigger picture. Mongo did this move also but there they were mostly in control before and after. Here there is a huge community of plugins. If before AWS shared a provider without hesitating, now they will ask themselves why contribute to a closed and possibly competitor garden.
- VectorLock 3y ago
  AWS has had a Terraform competitor for a long time; CloudFormation. I'm not sure how much they contribute to Terraform, some I think, but most of the AWS provider for Terraform to my knowledge is developed and owned by Hashicorp. If AWS just stopped contributing to Terraform development, I think it would have effectively zero difference.
hnav 3y ago
this is similar to other opencore debacles, Hashicorp wants you to use their managed Terraform rather than someone else's integration. This means that if you choose TF today for you managing your IaC you'll potentially be locked into using Hashi products down the road. The community is all but guaranteed to fork TF which means that over time the two forks will diverge and you'll have a bad time when trying to read docs, debug, contribute fixes.
dmattia 3y ago
You can continue to use plain Terraform forever. It would only affect you if you use a tool like Env0, spacelift, Gruntwork pipelines, etc instead of something like the Terraform Cloud. These tools are not going to be able to be used with users using new Terraform versions (though they can always use the current or any previous versions, or can use their fork these companies are jointly supporting). Then there are open source tools that don't directly compete with Hashicorp that are in a bit of a gray area, but I've seen Atlantis, Pulumi, OTF, and other tools all claim that this does not affect them. I would presume this could also apply to things like Terratest, Terragrunt, etc. but I don't know. I am not a lawyer. And if none of these company/product names are familiar to you, then you shouldn't have any noticeable difference :)
- cube2222 3y ago
  > These tools are not going to be able to be used with users using new Terraform versions As discussed in the other thread, we believe that we are not in violation of the new license, you can find more details in our today's announcement[0]. Disclaimer: Work at Spacelift. [0]: https://spacelift.io/blog/spacelift-latest-statement-on-hashicorp-bsl https://spacelift.io/blog/spacelift-latest-statement-on-hash...
  - dmattia 3y ago
    Oh neat, thanks for sharing this! I had read https://spacelift.io/blog/hashicorps-license-change https://spacelift.io/blog/hashicorps-license-change last week, but hadn't seen this blog yet. Best of luck with Spacelift :)
    - cube2222 3y ago
      Thanks, very appreciated!
lacker 3y ago
As a regular end-user, the main difference in the licenses is that it forks the ecosystem. If the fork goes ahead, and you were using some HashiCorp products and some software that is moving to OpenTF, eventually you won't be able to use that combination of tools any more. So you will have to pick what license you are going with, even if you don't care about the license directly.
mirzap 3y ago
It doesn't. And it will not make any difference. The same way as Sentry license, Elasticsearch, etc., doesn't have any difference for regular users. Those changes target cloud providers like Amazon, Google, etc.

LinXitoW 3y ago

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but if I use TF in a Petstore-as-a-Service to provision new machines for my users, does that not count as embedding TF? So if HashiCorp decides to do Petstore-as-a-Service tomorrow, no matter how shitty the offering, no matter how insincere, even if it's just a single intern working on it, I would have to, overnight, rip TF out of my entire offering, no?

yellowapple 3y ago
Correct. That, or "negotiate" with HashiCorp for a commercial license.

brikis98 3y ago

It means that whether you can use Terraform at any future company you work for will be determined... by HashiCorp. That's because the BSL license is intentionally vague. What does "competing" mean? What does "hosting or embedding" mean? Who decides? In order to really know if you're a competitor, you have to reach out to HashiCorp (as the FAQ tells you to do). So whether your usage is valid is not controlled by the license terms, but is instead entirely at the whim of HashiCorp. So they switched from a permissive open source license to a HashiCorp decides license: they get to decide on a case by case basis now—and they can change their mind at any time. That is very shaky footing on which to build anything. And the legal team at every company you work for will have to take that into account before deciding you can or can't use Terraform. See https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-open-ab0b9ba65bca https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-op... for more info.

robbintt 3y ago

It will affect categories of business users (programmers) who currently embrace terraform: amazon, google, microsoft, oracle, alibaba cloud. Like it or not, cohorts of engineering organizations like the above (cloud providers) have a very outsized weight and already have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow. From the article: The license does not allow you to use Terraform if you meet both of the following conditions: You are building a product that is competitive with HashiCorp. You embed or host Terraform in your product. My $0.02: the management of hashicorp is following a stupid trend and should have thought about their customers more. It will come out to what lawyers think, I guess. Lawyers usually say no to things with poorly established precedent.

cbo100 3y ago
> have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow. Then why didn’t they “choose” to fund hashicorp yesterday and avoid this? As usual in OSS-goes-private events these all just sound like “keep building our critical infrastructure tool for free or we will go elsewhere”. What is hashicorp or any other company in their position to do? This is not sustainable.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  > As usual in OSS-goes-private events these all just sound like “keep building our critical infrastructure tool for free or we will go elsewhere”. If Terraform was 100% developed by HashiCorp employees that would be fair description. It's more like "We're the only company allowed to make money off of the codebase you contributed to." > What is hashicorp or any other company in their position to do? I'd suggest paying developers to write proprietary code. That way they could just sell a product they fully own instead of having to pull this bullshit re-licensing of an open source codebase.

vrosas 3y ago

IANAL but it doesn’t seem like much, unless you’re planning on building a terraform-as-a-service company to compete directly with hashicorp. Honestly I’m not surprised given hashicorp’s enterprise offering are basically just… hosting the .tfstate file for you? I still can’t figure out what their upsell is.

pknomad 3y ago
Hosting the statefile in a secure way, state-locking, injecting the secrets so you're not keeping the secrets locally or in env var, and pre-built integration with other Hashicorp suite. I see the use case for it if you don't want to use a 3rd party or open source tool (Atlantis) but the pricing seems prohibitive.

pknomad 3y ago

Not much, right now. Long term? Possibly less adoption (teams may elect to go with Pulumi or some other alternatives), less 3rd party tooling available (what if Hashicorp decides your tool is their competitor?), etc. It seems very similar to the spat that community had with Red Hat with how 3rd party captures too much value from their own internal offering and leadership responds by changing the license model and makes things less open-source-y. Perhaps this will become the new normal for OSS/former OSS? IDK.

rst 3y ago

It depends on what you're using it for, and whether it competes with anything Hashicorp does -- or might do in the future. If you can guarantee that's "none", you're in the clear. But as the man said, prediction is hard, especially about the future.

yonixwm 3y ago

I think you will be affected by the bigger picture. Mongo did this move also but there they were mostly in control before and after. Here there is a huge community of plugins. If before AWS shared a provider without hesitating, now they will ask themselves why contribute to a closed and possibly competitor garden.

VectorLock 3y ago
AWS has had a Terraform competitor for a long time; CloudFormation. I'm not sure how much they contribute to Terraform, some I think, but most of the AWS provider for Terraform to my knowledge is developed and owned by Hashicorp. If AWS just stopped contributing to Terraform development, I think it would have effectively zero difference.

hnav 3y ago

this is similar to other opencore debacles, Hashicorp wants you to use their managed Terraform rather than someone else's integration. This means that if you choose TF today for you managing your IaC you'll potentially be locked into using Hashi products down the road. The community is all but guaranteed to fork TF which means that over time the two forks will diverge and you'll have a bad time when trying to read docs, debug, contribute fixes.

dmattia 3y ago

You can continue to use plain Terraform forever. It would only affect you if you use a tool like Env0, spacelift, Gruntwork pipelines, etc instead of something like the Terraform Cloud. These tools are not going to be able to be used with users using new Terraform versions (though they can always use the current or any previous versions, or can use their fork these companies are jointly supporting). Then there are open source tools that don't directly compete with Hashicorp that are in a bit of a gray area, but I've seen Atlantis, Pulumi, OTF, and other tools all claim that this does not affect them. I would presume this could also apply to things like Terratest, Terragrunt, etc. but I don't know. I am not a lawyer. And if none of these company/product names are familiar to you, then you shouldn't have any noticeable difference :)

cube2222 3y ago
> These tools are not going to be able to be used with users using new Terraform versions As discussed in the other thread, we believe that we are not in violation of the new license, you can find more details in our today's announcement[0]. Disclaimer: Work at Spacelift. [0]: https://spacelift.io/blog/spacelift-latest-statement-on-hashicorp-bsl https://spacelift.io/blog/spacelift-latest-statement-on-hash...
- dmattia 3y ago
  Oh neat, thanks for sharing this! I had read https://spacelift.io/blog/hashicorps-license-change https://spacelift.io/blog/hashicorps-license-change last week, but hadn't seen this blog yet. Best of luck with Spacelift :)
  - cube2222 3y ago
    Thanks, very appreciated!

lacker 3y ago

As a regular end-user, the main difference in the licenses is that it forks the ecosystem. If the fork goes ahead, and you were using some HashiCorp products and some software that is moving to OpenTF, eventually you won't be able to use that combination of tools any more. So you will have to pick what license you are going with, even if you don't care about the license directly.

mirzap 3y ago

It doesn't. And it will not make any difference. The same way as Sentry license, Elasticsearch, etc., doesn't have any difference for regular users. Those changes target cloud providers like Amazon, Google, etc.