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> leveraging their good will against them and costing them deals Spacelift co-founder here. I keep seeing this argument, and I'm puzzled. What good will are we

> leveraging their good will against them and costing them deals Spacelift co-founder here. I keep seeing this argument, and I'm puzzled. What good will are we talking about, and how are we leveraging it against anyone? Is building a good commercial product that folks love on top of an open source ecosystem somehow unethical? And if so - why? I used every opportunity to try and help Hashi build something better on top of core TF, both personally (applied for a job on their TFE team back in 2018, talked about many ideas that then went into Spacelift instead) and as a company (we tried VERY hard to partner). All to no avail. On the other hand, for 9 years non-Hashi folks (including ourselves here at Spacelift) spent countless hours, for the first years contributing to Terraform core, and more recently when PRs were no longer accepted they were still busy building providers, modules, tooling, courses, tutorials, cheatsheets, they've been running local meetups, all powered by the open source ethos and the common good. Not really sure who is leveraging whose good will here.

bcantrill 3y ago
This is a great comment -- there's a lot of wisdom in here for anyone contemplating repeating Hashi's mistakes!
- verdverm 3y ago
  We do t know if it was a mistake, only time can answer that. We for one have no impact or intention to stop using Hashi products
  - jsjdjd37 3y ago
    [flagged]
chaboud 3y ago
To me, this is the core bait and switch problem. It’s not just that expectations and commitments are suddenly unilaterally changed. Is that the core subject of the license (an open-source codebase) has quite often been built collaboratively with the agreement and contribution of entities outside of the organization unilaterally claiming domain over the underlying work. If this is somehow permissible under the original license, it points to needing licenses that offer more consistency and protection. If I contribute to your project, I want to make sure that you can’t close the door on the codebase whenever you feel that you’ve harvested enough value from me, value that you’re now going to go monetize with others.
- verdverm 3y ago
  Would you want outsiders dictating how your projects evolve? What if someone came along and monetized your project and didn't give any money back? Every project, company, contributor, and community get to decide this for themselves. There are no easy or correct answers
  - fishnchips 3y ago
    When you've had thousands of hours of free external contributions to the ecosystem, where is the actual ownership? Is it still "your project"? And if so, to what extent? What are your obligations to the community members and/or external contributors? On the monetization question - do you need to give others the opportunity to give money back? If so, who should assess the size and "adequacy" of these contributions? If you don't provide the opportunity for others to sponsor the project, does it change your rights and obligations? These are not easy questions, and now our entire industry is trying to work out the answers. OP's is one voice in this discussion, and an important one given GitLab's prominence and the fact that they took a different path, which seems to be working well for them. It's also a way more complex problem for software like Terraform that explicitly depends on the work of others for its core functionality than for something that works perfectly fine standalone, like Hashi's Vault, or indeed GitLab itself.
yebyen 3y ago
I wasn't talking about you at all. And I honestly haven't followed the conversation you (SpaceLift in particular) may have been having with Hashi or not, though I am absolutely aware of and maybe even in the same boat as you. I think this is an issue between Hashi and some V.V.large players, I suspect that there are big companies who are selling deals that say they "support Terraform" when they aren't actually building it or supplying labor to Terraform as a code project in any meaningful way. But they derive value from a pledge in their real big money contracts to "support Terraform" which in reality costs them nothing except that they will have had to accept the license terms, clearly, whatever they are at that time. They sell licenses to major (even government) institutions and Hashi OSS might be used as part of the solution, but Hashi aren't getting a cut of the deal. Let's say. I think those big companies want to have Terraform support with a capital T, and it would diminish their marks substantially to switch streams now and edge out Hashi, the smaller player (who is actually doing all of the work), by supporting OpenTF – separating them from ongoing development efforts of HashiCorp who undoubtedly are expending some significant labor to make and maintain Terraform itself. But I don't think it's right for Open Source companies to pull the rug on other companies that have built successful products on them. I think the best outcome possible for Spacelift and companies like it now is the OpenTF route (assuming you can't get a suitably proper BUSL license grant from HashiCorp, which it seems like you might if you get them to declare you "not a competitor" even once, according to the FAQ as it reads today. IANAL.) I think you're using the MPL software as the license was designed, and your company should be able to deliver Terraform with additional value provided through the interface and the scaffolding (eg. better Terraform Cloud) that you built around it, and charge money for it. But of course I'm not the lawyer. I am very glad to meet you here though!
- dwaite 3y ago
  > I think the best outcome possible for Spacelift and companies like it now is the OpenTF route (assuming you can't get a suitably proper BUSL license grant from HashiCorp, which it seems like you might if you get them to declare you "not a competitor" even once, according to the FAQ as it reads today. IANAL.) IANAL as well, but this sounds like a HUGE trap. Will that protect you from their next licensing change and its restrictions? Is such a declaration transferrable? Would it limit Spacelift's exit strategies because they would be unable to ship their product if acquired? If there is a community where the new licensing terms no longer meet people's needs, then something like OpenTF is absolutely the right way to go. Anything else, and your company is operating by the grace of Hashi.

bcantrill 3y ago

This is a great comment -- there's a lot of wisdom in here for anyone contemplating repeating Hashi's mistakes!

verdverm 3y ago
We do t know if it was a mistake, only time can answer that. We for one have no impact or intention to stop using Hashi products
- jsjdjd37 3y ago
  [flagged]

chaboud 3y ago

To me, this is the core bait and switch problem. It’s not just that expectations and commitments are suddenly unilaterally changed. Is that the core subject of the license (an open-source codebase) has quite often been built collaboratively with the agreement and contribution of entities outside of the organization unilaterally claiming domain over the underlying work. If this is somehow permissible under the original license, it points to needing licenses that offer more consistency and protection. If I contribute to your project, I want to make sure that you can’t close the door on the codebase whenever you feel that you’ve harvested enough value from me, value that you’re now going to go monetize with others.

verdverm 3y ago
Would you want outsiders dictating how your projects evolve? What if someone came along and monetized your project and didn't give any money back? Every project, company, contributor, and community get to decide this for themselves. There are no easy or correct answers
- fishnchips 3y ago
  When you've had thousands of hours of free external contributions to the ecosystem, where is the actual ownership? Is it still "your project"? And if so, to what extent? What are your obligations to the community members and/or external contributors? On the monetization question - do you need to give others the opportunity to give money back? If so, who should assess the size and "adequacy" of these contributions? If you don't provide the opportunity for others to sponsor the project, does it change your rights and obligations? These are not easy questions, and now our entire industry is trying to work out the answers. OP's is one voice in this discussion, and an important one given GitLab's prominence and the fact that they took a different path, which seems to be working well for them. It's also a way more complex problem for software like Terraform that explicitly depends on the work of others for its core functionality than for something that works perfectly fine standalone, like Hashi's Vault, or indeed GitLab itself.

yebyen 3y ago

I wasn't talking about you at all. And I honestly haven't followed the conversation you (SpaceLift in particular) may have been having with Hashi or not, though I am absolutely aware of and maybe even in the same boat as you. I think this is an issue between Hashi and some V.V.large players, I suspect that there are big companies who are selling deals that say they "support Terraform" when they aren't actually building it or supplying labor to Terraform as a code project in any meaningful way. But they derive value from a pledge in their real big money contracts to "support Terraform" which in reality costs them nothing except that they will have had to accept the license terms, clearly, whatever they are at that time. They sell licenses to major (even government) institutions and Hashi OSS might be used as part of the solution, but Hashi aren't getting a cut of the deal. Let's say. I think those big companies want to have Terraform support with a capital T, and it would diminish their marks substantially to switch streams now and edge out Hashi, the smaller player (who is actually doing all of the work), by supporting OpenTF – separating them from ongoing development efforts of HashiCorp who undoubtedly are expending some significant labor to make and maintain Terraform itself. But I don't think it's right for Open Source companies to pull the rug on other companies that have built successful products on them. I think the best outcome possible for Spacelift and companies like it now is the OpenTF route (assuming you can't get a suitably proper BUSL license grant from HashiCorp, which it seems like you might if you get them to declare you "not a competitor" even once, according to the FAQ as it reads today. IANAL.) I think you're using the MPL software as the license was designed, and your company should be able to deliver Terraform with additional value provided through the interface and the scaffolding (eg. better Terraform Cloud) that you built around it, and charge money for it. But of course I'm not the lawyer. I am very glad to meet you here though!

dwaite 3y ago
> I think the best outcome possible for Spacelift and companies like it now is the OpenTF route (assuming you can't get a suitably proper BUSL license grant from HashiCorp, which it seems like you might if you get them to declare you "not a competitor" even once, according to the FAQ as it reads today. IANAL.) IANAL as well, but this sounds like a HUGE trap. Will that protect you from their next licensing change and its restrictions? Is such a declaration transferrable? Would it limit Spacelift's exit strategies because they would be unable to ship their product if acquired? If there is a community where the new licensing terms no longer meet people's needs, then something like OpenTF is absolutely the right way to go. Anything else, and your company is operating by the grace of Hashi.