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I'm thrilled to see that OpenTF appears to be aiming to win on positives, not negatives. They could be focusing on the licence and their perception of Hashicorp

I'm thrilled to see that OpenTF appears to be aiming to win on positives, not negatives. They could be focusing on the licence and their perception of Hashicorp, but instead there's a lot of emphasis on the positive: getting up and running quickly, upcoming releases, public roadmap, and pledges of engineering work. In the long run few will care about this licencing change (as much as they should!) – business users will accept it, individuals won't take any notice, and competitors would get mired in issues as expected. Basically a win for Hashicorp. But winning on positive changes beats licencing issues. Business users will go where the centre of gravity in the ecosystem is, individuals will too, and will prefer free (in both senses) solutions, and competitors will push this hard to all their customers. It'll be interesting to see Hashicorp needing to build OpenTF support into their products to remain compatible. > So far, four companies pledged the equivalent of 14 full-time engineers (FTEs) to the OpenTF initiative. We expect this number to at least double in the following few weeks. To give you some perspective, Terraform was effectively maintained by about 5 FTEs from HashiCorp in the last 2 years. If you don’t believe us, look at their repository. Wow. Even if most of this doesn't actually play out in the long run, that's some good support.

EspressoGPT 3y ago
> They could be focusing on the licence and their perception of Hashicorp They literally do: "HashiCorp even had all contributors sign a CLA which explicitly said (link to the CLA in the Internet Archive as HashiCorp has of course removed this wording): [...] The move to BUSL—which is not a free and open source license—broke the implicit contract. That was the brash action! Terraform would've never gotten the adoption it did, or all the contributions from the community had it not been open source. Most of us would've never agreed to the CLA to contribute to the project if it was BUSL licensed. Taking all those contributions and all that community trust, and then changing to the BUSL license is a bait and switch." [1] I agree with the overall sentiment, but they could've left out all the judging side comments. [1] Source: https://opentf.org/#why-fork https://opentf.org/#why-fork
- jen20 3y ago
  > "HashiCorp even had all contributors sign a CLA Of course, this is untrue. They may have had all contributors after some specific date sign one, but it is simply untrue that all contributors have signed one at all.
  - mattl 3y ago
    How did they relicense without one?
    - fishnchips 3y ago
      How indeed.
      - jen20 3y ago
        Directly answered by [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266016
        fishnchips 3y ago
        Answered incorrectly. All the code is relicensed with BUSL header on each and every file.
        jen20 3y ago
        Again, wrong. Whether that has been done is independent of whether that is permissible, based on copyright assignment.
        fishnchips 3y ago
        Are you implying they had no right to do that?
        3y ago
skrebbel 3y ago
For anyone also wondering, that last quote is from here: https://opentf.org/#why-fork https://opentf.org/#why-fork
robertlagrant 3y ago
It's support from companies who make money from Terraform being free, and at least one looked like a direct Terraform Cloud competitor that probably hurt Hashicorp's chances of making Terraform profitable. It makes sense they'd do this, but we need to stop loving people who appear to give us things. They're just making reasonable business decisions.
- prepend 3y ago
  I prefer reasonable business decisions that support open source software over companies baiting and switching. If Hashicorp didn’t have a business plan that made money off terraform being OSS then the time for that was years ago. If you release as OSS then your competitors will use it to. This is predictable and all plans should account for it. This competition didn’t hurt Hashicorps chances of profitability, they were factored in from the beginning.
  - louzell 3y ago
    I mean, businesses change? The founders didn't have a crystal ball to see how every decision would play out. Reading through these comments, I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is". If Hashicorp had started with this new license in the first place, do we really think they wouldn't have had the business success that they've had? We'll never know, but my guess is that a license that says "competitors can't copy us" would seem totally reasonable to folks contributing, and irrelevant to customers that have a problem to solve. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I want to understand this obviously passionate response. (Since I've commented a couple times on this let me also say I'm not a hashicorp employee nor know anyone there)
    - dablya 3y ago
      I don't know that it's at all clear how successful Terraform would be if it started with a more restrictive license. I mean there is a reason why a lot of projects start out with a different license and only change to BSL once a certain level of popularity is achieved, right?
zaphirplane 3y ago
I am sceptical that 14 - 28 FTE will be dedicated to openTF. If I was to guess it is 14-28 people working on their companies offering and when needed upstreaming bug fixes and features, PR review env0 a small Company is providing 5 FTE, the web claims their revenue is <5m (1.4m)
- cube2222 3y ago
  We actually specifically don't want this to be our employees. Rather, we want the foundation to employ the maintainers (whom we'll pay for). Which is partially because of the bad incentives the former approach creates. Disclaimer: Work at Spacelift, and currently temporary Technical Lead of the OpenTF Project, until it's committee-steered.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Sounds like a good first plan to go with, with a decent chance of success. :)
- ohad1282 3y ago
  env0 founder here. env0 raised $42M (from investors such as Microsoft) and growing fast. We are honored to support OpenTF and already assigned 5 engineers (you will see the usernames in the opentf GitHub repo once that become public).
gjvc 3y ago
I'm thrilled to see that OpenTF appears to be aiming to win on positives, not negatives. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." -- Peter Drucker

EspressoGPT 3y ago

> They could be focusing on the licence and their perception of Hashicorp They literally do: "HashiCorp even had all contributors sign a CLA which explicitly said (link to the CLA in the Internet Archive as HashiCorp has of course removed this wording): [...] The move to BUSL—which is not a free and open source license—broke the implicit contract. That was the brash action! Terraform would've never gotten the adoption it did, or all the contributions from the community had it not been open source. Most of us would've never agreed to the CLA to contribute to the project if it was BUSL licensed. Taking all those contributions and all that community trust, and then changing to the BUSL license is a bait and switch." [1] I agree with the overall sentiment, but they could've left out all the judging side comments. [1] Source: https://opentf.org/#why-fork https://opentf.org/#why-fork

jen20 3y ago
> "HashiCorp even had all contributors sign a CLA Of course, this is untrue. They may have had all contributors after some specific date sign one, but it is simply untrue that all contributors have signed one at all.
- mattl 3y ago
  How did they relicense without one?
  - fishnchips 3y ago
    How indeed.
    - jen20 3y ago
      Directly answered by [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266016
      - fishnchips 3y ago
        Answered incorrectly. All the code is relicensed with BUSL header on each and every file.
        jen20 3y ago
        Again, wrong. Whether that has been done is independent of whether that is permissible, based on copyright assignment.
        fishnchips 3y ago
        Are you implying they had no right to do that?
        3y ago

skrebbel 3y ago

For anyone also wondering, that last quote is from here: https://opentf.org/#why-fork https://opentf.org/#why-fork

robertlagrant 3y ago

It's support from companies who make money from Terraform being free, and at least one looked like a direct Terraform Cloud competitor that probably hurt Hashicorp's chances of making Terraform profitable. It makes sense they'd do this, but we need to stop loving people who appear to give us things. They're just making reasonable business decisions.

prepend 3y ago
I prefer reasonable business decisions that support open source software over companies baiting and switching. If Hashicorp didn’t have a business plan that made money off terraform being OSS then the time for that was years ago. If you release as OSS then your competitors will use it to. This is predictable and all plans should account for it. This competition didn’t hurt Hashicorps chances of profitability, they were factored in from the beginning.
- louzell 3y ago
  I mean, businesses change? The founders didn't have a crystal ball to see how every decision would play out. Reading through these comments, I'm reminded of a pop psychology book that I read that essentially said "never try to take someone away, no matter how small, it is perceived as a much larger loss than it is". If Hashicorp had started with this new license in the first place, do we really think they wouldn't have had the business success that they've had? We'll never know, but my guess is that a license that says "competitors can't copy us" would seem totally reasonable to folks contributing, and irrelevant to customers that have a problem to solve. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I want to understand this obviously passionate response. (Since I've commented a couple times on this let me also say I'm not a hashicorp employee nor know anyone there)
  - dablya 3y ago
    I don't know that it's at all clear how successful Terraform would be if it started with a more restrictive license. I mean there is a reason why a lot of projects start out with a different license and only change to BSL once a certain level of popularity is achieved, right?

zaphirplane 3y ago

I am sceptical that 14 - 28 FTE will be dedicated to openTF. If I was to guess it is 14-28 people working on their companies offering and when needed upstreaming bug fixes and features, PR review env0 a small Company is providing 5 FTE, the web claims their revenue is <5m (1.4m)

cube2222 3y ago
We actually specifically don't want this to be our employees. Rather, we want the foundation to employ the maintainers (whom we'll pay for). Which is partially because of the bad incentives the former approach creates. Disclaimer: Work at Spacelift, and currently temporary Technical Lead of the OpenTF Project, until it's committee-steered.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Sounds like a good first plan to go with, with a decent chance of success. :)
ohad1282 3y ago
env0 founder here. env0 raised $42M (from investors such as Microsoft) and growing fast. We are honored to support OpenTF and already assigned 5 engineers (you will see the usernames in the opentf GitHub repo once that become public).

gjvc 3y ago

I'm thrilled to see that OpenTF appears to be aiming to win on positives, not negatives. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." -- Peter Drucker