10 ms·

We Are Not Supporting OpenTF

67 points by talonx 3y ago

rdelpret 3y ago
Hudson and Jenkins come to mind here
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
Oh My... 99% of users are not affected only companies which have profit motive. Do not forget it is those companies which provide the choice to the users and Hashicorp strives to restrict their choice. Hashicorp should not be seen in the vacuum. What is point of it all ? The point is Hashicorp is looking to monetize their ecosystem better, meaning making things more expensive for customers. You probably seen RedHat's play - kill CentOS to improve RHEL monetization, not enough ? Take the next step to try to kill off some alternatives
benced 3y ago
It’s absolutely crazy to me that other companies free-ride off of companies like Hashicorp and Mongo’s work and the free-riders are the ones many - particularly on this site - support.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sverhagen 3y ago
  One of the arguments is that there are many non-Hashicorp contributors to Terraform, not to mention the larger ecosystem, who want a say in keeping their work free. This argument is even extended to Hashicorp currently only spending less than a handful of fte's on Terraform maintenance. If you subscribe to those views, you turn the "taking a free ride" argument on its head.
  - mborch 3y ago
    I'll add that at the end of the day, a maintainer of open source needs to tend to its garden in order to receive contributions. This is a case of HashiCorp failing to do that on multiple levels (devoting too few resources, changing licenses, etc). So people leave to form new communities and that's only natural.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    Those contributors work will still be free for the rest of time under MPL 2.0. The change now is that new changes will take 4 years until they become MPL 2.0, but until then those new change's source is still available for people to work with, fix bugs, and adapt to their business's needs.
- jchw 3y ago
  It gets pointed out every time that this is not the case at all. It's not even subtle; it's about open source and the not-so-fine line between protecting your business model versus exploitation. https://lwn.net/Articles/942346/ https://lwn.net/Articles/942346/ Notably, while AGPL is probably not the best license for unrelated reasons, most people do not have any conceptual qualms with the AGPL. I can not say the same for the pretend-open licenses that have been being pushed through with all of the usual excuses. Also, robust open source projects have outside contributors. When you're contributing to an open source project under open license terms, it's mutually beneficial. But why would other companies willingly contribute to closed/shared source projects? What exactly is in it for them? Hence the resources that are being dedicated to OpenTF.
  - bb88 3y ago
    > most people do not have any conceptual qualms with the AGPL. Some claim that if AGPL is very toxic, and that even viewing AGPL code might taint any project you work on later. The reasoning goes that if you see something useful in an AGPL project and decide to use it (not copy and paste but actually recode it from scratch), the AGPL license follows that code in your head. It's not dissimilar to a certain argument of patents. The more you read patents the more liability you potentially have in a lawsuit, so literally ignorance is bliss.
    - jchw 3y ago
      > Some claim that if AGPL is very toxic, Google (and other large enterprises) definitely claims this, though honestly I think the main problem with the AGPL is the mechanism by which it works, not necessarily the idea behind it. > and that even viewing AGPL code might taint any project you work on later. Never heard this before. I also have no idea why this would be any different from other potentially-not open source software licenses. > It's not dissimilar to a certain argument of patents. The more you read patents the more liability you potentially have in a lawsuit, so literally ignorance is bliss. For patents I understand why this is the case even if it's not necessarily an ideal situation, but for AGPL it's still just copyright law at play, regardless of what the restrictions are. I don't understand how this differs from other licenses so strongly.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Hashicorp built Terraform on top of other FOSS systems. Other companies built on top of Terraform. And then Hashicorp pulls the rug out. Yeah, I can imagine how those companies are irked, just as Hashicorp would be if Google suddenly made Go proprietary or Linus locked up Linux. How much did HC pay to use Go or Linux? Face it: we all free ride off others’ work, and in turn, they use ours. And look at how much amazing stuff we all have — for free! — because of it.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Pity that my supermarket doesn't take pull requests.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      Indeed. I trade favors with my other professional friends all the time: my buddy gives me legal advice, and I audit his security setup. We both win! It’s amazing how nice it is to give and receive quality work without having to swap cash for every little thing.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Yes, it is incredible that a site dedicated to startups and creating companies, has so many people that advocate not paying for the work of others, while expecting to be paid for their own work, made possible by such tooling. In that regard our profession is a shame when comparing with other industries.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    How much did you pay for the TCP/IP stack you posted that with? Your web browser? The extensions in it? This website? Everything we do is built on the shoulders of giants. If we’re very lucky, we’ll make something nice that others will want to build upon in turn.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      I expect Microsoft, IBM, Apple...to have paid whatever is required. As consumer from commercial software, and someone that has paid FOSS developers since the mid-90's, I am quite comfortable doing statements about people abusing other people's work.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        And OpenTF contributors paid exactly as much as is required.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Yeah right, saving this reply for when OpenTF fork also goes commercial in a couple of years, or fades into obscurity as the big defenders fail to keep it going. I will give it 5 years time.
        benterix 3y ago
        Well, we'll see about that. I, for one, can't wait t see the improvements the community has been asking for years.
- mikemcquaid 3y ago
  It’s crazy to me how many people in the software industry consider abiding by the terms of the software’s license, rather than some moral imperative to do more, to be “free riding”. If Hashicorp wanted to stop “free riding” the solution was and is simple: don’t make Terraform open-source. Open source works well without (much and often any) money involved. Businesses don’t. This is why open source is not an automatic business model. Yours, someone who has spent the last 14 years maintaining a popular open source project mostly without any money and now with some donations.
- jsiepkes 3y ago
  There is no way Hashicorp would have gotten this level of adoption (and become this big) as they are today if they offered their products in a classic Microsoft, Oracle, etc. pay to license way. Now that they have gotten what they want (get big) they have decided to alter the deal. That upsets people.
- kelnos 3y ago
  It's not free-riding to use a project under the terms of its license. Users are in no way obligated to pay or contribute back. (I say this as an open source developer myself.) If HashiCorp didn't like that, they should have made TF proprietary in the first place. But of course they didn't do that: they knew that if they'd done so, they would have gotten very little traction. But now that many people and businesses depend on TF, they've decided to change the rules. Pretty scummy.
gobins 3y ago
> Notably, the three largest companies that most-directly compete with HashiCorp’s managed Terraform offerings, Spacelift, Env0, and Scalr, all have made multi-million dollar pledges to support a fork of Terraform (13 FTEs for five years between these three companies). Wow all these three companies have products offering automation using Terraform. Obviously they would be against the license change.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Terraform is only popular because it was open source. It wouldn’t have been 1/10th as widespread if it had started proprietary.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Because it was libre, or because it was (is) gratis? I know that I downloaded and learned Terraform because it was free of charge only. I honestly didn't care and I didn't know about its specific licensing status. I was able to quickly and easily install, configure, and run it because Hashicorp made it available as a free-of-charge download. Period, full stop. Compare it to VirtualBox, which is clearly not F/OSS, but gratis to download and use. In fact my employer mandates our use of VBox, so we all download it, irrespective of license terms. It's extremely popular, even outstripping qemu and other libre VMM implementations.
    - dizhn 3y ago
      It's the guest additions ISO thingy that's not open source.
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        > It's the guest additions ISO thingy that's not open source. No, it's the extension pack that is closed source and under a non-GPL license. The guest additions ISO is commonly confused with the extension pack, but they have completely different spheres of influence and functionality. Guest additions is GPLv2, just as the main app is. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
imadethis 3y ago
> That being said, after HashiCorp’s CTO released “binding” answers to some of these FAQs, it seems clear that the only folks who this affects are those that sell software to other companies. I’m not so sure about this. The Licensing FAQ doesn’t have the full legal weight of an update or addendum to the actual license. There’s no guarantee that they won’t renege these “binding” answers next year, and unlike the license agreement my company isn’t agreeing to them as terms of use.
- hodgesrm 3y ago
  If they are binding why not add them to the license? Rights for GPLv2, Apache 2.0, etc., are defined in one place. That's one of the main strengths of those agreements.
- yankput 3y ago
  Yeah, some FAQ on some random site doesn’t constitute a license
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    hashicorp.com is not a random site. While an FAQ does not necessarily constitute a license, this FAQ Hashicorp is binding so it becomes an extention of it.
    - jclulow 3y ago
      Why don't they just whack it straight in the licence text then?
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        It is via a hyperlink. https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl
        placatedmayhem 3y ago
rahkiin 3y ago
My biggest concern is the legally untested clause in their BUSL on ‘competing with hashicorp’. I do not know whether I can run Terraform from a production control panel to start new infra for customers. I do not know when this competing might change. Their faq comments are useless: they had a faq item before saying they would be FOSS forever which they removed with this move.
- bostik 3y ago
  This is the core of the matter. With the language of their license, they have a financial incentive to start offering services that increasingly cover more and more of the possible "bulk" use cases. Your use might have been perfectly fine last week, but can be competing with their new offerings from the beginning of next week.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >I do not know whether I can run Terraform from a production control panel to start new infra for customers Is what you are doing competing with Terraform cloud? You can send your questions to licensing@hashicorp.com for clarification.
  - trilbyglens 3y ago
    Nice try
kstrauser 3y ago
I replaced “Terraform” with “XFree86” and “OpenTF” with “X.org” as I read it, and the arguments sounded so familiar. “If they fork XF86, users won’t know which product to install. They’ll drift apart and ruin the whole market!” Or maybe everyone will (once again) adopt the truly open version that the majority of contributors switch to. Either way, I’m not too worried about it. Forks of open source projects happen all the time for a thousand reasons. That certainly beats closed stagnation!
dangus 3y ago
Who is this dragon company and what weight does their opinion hold anyway? Most of these reasons to not fork are pretty half-baked. > A schism like this would be devastating for the tool’s adoption Except when it isn’t, like in the case of LibreOffice. Terraform is already by far the most popular in its category. It’s pretty obvious that OpenTF will instantly be the superior choice by the merits of the license alone. HashiCorp will have the support of one company while OpenTF will be backed by multiple companies. Cloud providers like AWS will have an automatic legal incentive to contribute to their providers as a part of the OpenTF project instead of HashiCorp. HashiCorp will be alone on an island. Other parts of this article basically just say “don’t worry, HashiCorp won’t sue you.” Sorry, that’s not as good as free and open source. Yes, HashiCorp is moving too slowly. That’s why they have to use the Oracle army of lawyers method, because most of the value in Terraform Cloud can be replicated in a weekend with a Gitlab template. Print the terraform plan out to the MR comments, use Gitlab’s variable management for secrets, manage your state in the backend of your choice, and that’s pretty much it. Also, the terraform private registry gives you zero benefit over using repository URLs with references to tags/commits/branches. Yet another thing you don’t need terraform cloud for.
- klooney 3y ago
  They look like a Terraform Enterprise competitor, which makes it all a little weird.
clxfDf 3y ago
TLDR; if we don’t keep TF open source in 5 years everything will become Terraform Cloud - horrible, painful to work with Enterprise-grade BS. I don’t think forking is bad for terraform ecosystems. It might be bad for HashiCorp, but for community in general it can become that source of competition that will make terraform even better. Let’s be honest, most of the modules are made by community, there are thousands of modules out there. HashiCorp recently spent all their love on enterprise related products (like TF Cloud) and almost no love on terraform itself. Our team tried TF Cloud (because it’s HashiCorp, it should be a great product, huh?) and the experience was horrible. If we let HashiCorp do that licensing trick they as a company won’t have any incentives to improve terraform.
coverband 3y ago
I don’t agree at all with the arguments here. Terraform is so widely adopted that it has become a basic, almost built-in component of every cloud ecosystem. Hashicorp would have been better off by treating it as a Trojan horse into enterprises and focusing on its other assets. I expect there will be a newcomer that will take advantage of this mishap and we’ll be talking about their solution next year (unless OpenTF manages to win people over).
codeflo 3y ago
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products. > A “competitive offering” is a product that is sold to third parties, including through paid support arrangements, that significantly overlaps the capabilities of a HashiCorp commercial product. We all get what they're trying to do. The bad thing is that this isn't only overly broad, but a moving target. I looked at HashiCorp's product page, and they're building up a wide portfolio of IaaS tools. Those are such fundamental tools that even if you're not a cloud provider at all, you're likely to have an overlap in "capabilities" at some point. IMO, IANAL and all that, that's a significant business risk for anyone using Terraform, for any purpose.
buzer 3y ago
> The only companies that need to worry about the license change are those with production products that are “offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp’s products.” That's might be the current situation but it does not mean that will last. If the license changes again or if they e.g. decide stop the development, it will be a lot harder to make a fork in order to e.g. keep up to date with security patches. > these problems with the Terraform core repository are not new > The only material change over the past ~14 days, in our opinion, is that certain business’s have had their margin profile change. Often people deal with things until something breaks camel's back. In this case it was the license change for many companies/users and hopefully it will mean that OpenTF will end up fixing those earlier problems as well.
raffraffraff 3y ago
> HashiCorp could feel forced to strengthen its position and introduce incompatible differences in new releases of Terraform and major-cloud providers I'm sure it's hard to turn FOSS into money. I sympathize. But poisoning the well too discourage competitors will drive everybody away. But could they really? Who actually developed the AWS provider? My biggest problem with terraform over the last few years is that it always feels like they haven't been investing enough development in it. This has been spelled out directly by Terraform employees in their github issues, and it's visible by inference in the way that they disengage from certain issues.
benterix 3y ago
The arguments presented by dragondrop are a classic example of FUD. The author is afraid of what Hashicorp can do if we don't just ignore the license change and pretend nothing happened. Based on that fear, they present various scenarios that seem scary to them. But when you look closer, these fears are ridiculous. For example, "people will be confused whether they should use TF or OpenTF". Guess what: at the beginning everybody will be using TF except a small minority who will consciously chose OpenTF, mostly for development. And they will make sure that, at least at the beginning, the choice will be irrelevant because the compatibility between these two is a top priority. It's like saying in 2004 "You shouldn't release CentOS because people will not be sure if they want to run CentOS or Red Hat". It simply makes no sense. All other arguments are like that.
Woshiwuja 3y ago
[flagged]
stbenjam 3y ago
OpenTF is a good thing. Hashicorp basically stopped reviewing community terraform contributions a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425849 They have no skills in managing true open source projects. We’re better off in an OpenTF World. We don’t need their support.
- ringstar 3y ago
  > They have no skills in managing true open source projects. We’re better off in an OpenTF World. We don’t need their support. This is so disingenuous. HC started and managed several of the biggest OSS projects out there. They significantly contributed to and evangelized OSS for over a decade. It's easy to say "we don't need their support" when you're piggybacking off of 13 years of their work and money. I think that's what frustrates me about this whole thing. It's not the actual forking of terraform but it's the attitude that the companies and people behind OpenTF have had as they've gone through this. There's been a certain smugness and sense of entitlement that this entire thing gives off which doesn't sit right with me. Don't forget that the main drivers behind this are companies that stand to lose the most (commercially) from the licensing change. It's not as altruistic as they make it seem. I would probably feel better about it if they just came out and said that this impacts their business prospects and as a result they're forking it. But they put this "we're doing this for the community" veil over it which feels disingenuous.
  - yuppie_scum 3y ago
    Totally agree. You’ve done a great job articulating my feelings on the matter as someone who writes a lot of TF day in and day out (end user, not an integrator/consultant/etc). Follow the money. Without a workable IaC tool a lot of the backing companies’ business models fail. That’s why they’re treating this like the final act of Les Miserables. HC has done a lot of great work with TF but left themselves open to this competition by not providing better value consulting services or pricing around TF cloud.
- goku12 3y ago
  You're probably right. But they should find a new name. Terraform is a trademark and it will confuse potential adopters - even if they stick an 'open' in front of it.
nikolay 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  > sociopath You can't post personal attacks here, and that's a doozy. No more of this please. You can easily make your substantive points without it.
  - nikolay 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 3y ago
      It's a cliché of internet psychiatric diagnosis, a variety of personal attack that is particularly not allowed here. Please don't do it again. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22internet%20psychiatric%20diagnosis%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
      - nikolay 3y ago
        Then tell me, why did they remove the video? Isn't this confirming my diagnosis?
        dang 3y ago
        No; but that's irrelevant. The point is please don't post personal attacks to HN.
andreashaerter 3y ago
I think many start-ups use open source mainly as an argument for adoption in the ecosystem, and they have to consider the consequences. Many projects avoid choosing AGPL or GPLv3 licenses to facilitate easier enterprise adoption ('Hey, we can use X and create SaaS without hassle') without generating revenue, while being funded by venture capital and without getting contributions back. Then, when they are adopted, they complain. While the contributions from corporations like HashiCorp are impressive, the overall situation is complex. There's a reason why Linux is still around and growing. From my point of view: Stick with a real, copyleft license that has less adoption by other enterprises and focuses on organic growth instead of VC-driven hypergrowth. Alternatively, be prepared for the consequences that Amazon or other hyperscalers will attract a large number of potential customers using your product without giving anything back. In that case, establish another source of income right away. One has to be realistic: Competing with your open-source product's SaaS against a SaaS by Amazon or other hyperscalers will not work out if that's your only way to make money. Edit: typos, grammar

67 points by talonx 3y ago

Hudson and Jenkins come to mind here

Oh My... 99% of users are not affected only companies which have profit motive. Do not forget it is those companies which provide the choice to the users and Hashicorp strives to restrict their choice. Hashicorp should not be seen in the vacuum. What is point of it all ? The point is Hashicorp is looking to monetize their ecosystem better, meaning making things more expensive for customers. You probably seen RedHat's play - kill CentOS to improve RHEL monetization, not enough ? Take the next step to try to kill off some alternatives

benced 3y ago

It’s absolutely crazy to me that other companies free-ride off of companies like Hashicorp and Mongo’s work and the free-riders are the ones many - particularly on this site - support.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sverhagen 3y ago
One of the arguments is that there are many non-Hashicorp contributors to Terraform, not to mention the larger ecosystem, who want a say in keeping their work free. This argument is even extended to Hashicorp currently only spending less than a handful of fte's on Terraform maintenance. If you subscribe to those views, you turn the "taking a free ride" argument on its head.
- mborch 3y ago
  I'll add that at the end of the day, a maintainer of open source needs to tend to its garden in order to receive contributions. This is a case of HashiCorp failing to do that on multiple levels (devoting too few resources, changing licenses, etc). So people leave to form new communities and that's only natural.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Those contributors work will still be free for the rest of time under MPL 2.0. The change now is that new changes will take 4 years until they become MPL 2.0, but until then those new change's source is still available for people to work with, fix bugs, and adapt to their business's needs.
jchw 3y ago
It gets pointed out every time that this is not the case at all. It's not even subtle; it's about open source and the not-so-fine line between protecting your business model versus exploitation. https://lwn.net/Articles/942346/ https://lwn.net/Articles/942346/ Notably, while AGPL is probably not the best license for unrelated reasons, most people do not have any conceptual qualms with the AGPL. I can not say the same for the pretend-open licenses that have been being pushed through with all of the usual excuses. Also, robust open source projects have outside contributors. When you're contributing to an open source project under open license terms, it's mutually beneficial. But why would other companies willingly contribute to closed/shared source projects? What exactly is in it for them? Hence the resources that are being dedicated to OpenTF.
- bb88 3y ago
  > most people do not have any conceptual qualms with the AGPL. Some claim that if AGPL is very toxic, and that even viewing AGPL code might taint any project you work on later. The reasoning goes that if you see something useful in an AGPL project and decide to use it (not copy and paste but actually recode it from scratch), the AGPL license follows that code in your head. It's not dissimilar to a certain argument of patents. The more you read patents the more liability you potentially have in a lawsuit, so literally ignorance is bliss.
  - jchw 3y ago
    > Some claim that if AGPL is very toxic, Google (and other large enterprises) definitely claims this, though honestly I think the main problem with the AGPL is the mechanism by which it works, not necessarily the idea behind it. > and that even viewing AGPL code might taint any project you work on later. Never heard this before. I also have no idea why this would be any different from other potentially-not open source software licenses. > It's not dissimilar to a certain argument of patents. The more you read patents the more liability you potentially have in a lawsuit, so literally ignorance is bliss. For patents I understand why this is the case even if it's not necessarily an ideal situation, but for AGPL it's still just copyright law at play, regardless of what the restrictions are. I don't understand how this differs from other licenses so strongly.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kstrauser 3y ago
Hashicorp built Terraform on top of other FOSS systems. Other companies built on top of Terraform. And then Hashicorp pulls the rug out. Yeah, I can imagine how those companies are irked, just as Hashicorp would be if Google suddenly made Go proprietary or Linus locked up Linux. How much did HC pay to use Go or Linux? Face it: we all free ride off others’ work, and in turn, they use ours. And look at how much amazing stuff we all have — for free! — because of it.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Pity that my supermarket doesn't take pull requests.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    Indeed. I trade favors with my other professional friends all the time: my buddy gives me legal advice, and I audit his security setup. We both win! It’s amazing how nice it is to give and receive quality work without having to swap cash for every little thing.
pjmlp 3y ago
Yes, it is incredible that a site dedicated to startups and creating companies, has so many people that advocate not paying for the work of others, while expecting to be paid for their own work, made possible by such tooling. In that regard our profession is a shame when comparing with other industries.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  How much did you pay for the TCP/IP stack you posted that with? Your web browser? The extensions in it? This website? Everything we do is built on the shoulders of giants. If we’re very lucky, we’ll make something nice that others will want to build upon in turn.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    I expect Microsoft, IBM, Apple...to have paid whatever is required. As consumer from commercial software, and someone that has paid FOSS developers since the mid-90's, I am quite comfortable doing statements about people abusing other people's work.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      And OpenTF contributors paid exactly as much as is required.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Yeah right, saving this reply for when OpenTF fork also goes commercial in a couple of years, or fades into obscurity as the big defenders fail to keep it going. I will give it 5 years time.
        benterix 3y ago
        Well, we'll see about that. I, for one, can't wait t see the improvements the community has been asking for years.
mikemcquaid 3y ago
It’s crazy to me how many people in the software industry consider abiding by the terms of the software’s license, rather than some moral imperative to do more, to be “free riding”. If Hashicorp wanted to stop “free riding” the solution was and is simple: don’t make Terraform open-source. Open source works well without (much and often any) money involved. Businesses don’t. This is why open source is not an automatic business model. Yours, someone who has spent the last 14 years maintaining a popular open source project mostly without any money and now with some donations.
jsiepkes 3y ago
There is no way Hashicorp would have gotten this level of adoption (and become this big) as they are today if they offered their products in a classic Microsoft, Oracle, etc. pay to license way. Now that they have gotten what they want (get big) they have decided to alter the deal. That upsets people.
kelnos 3y ago
It's not free-riding to use a project under the terms of its license. Users are in no way obligated to pay or contribute back. (I say this as an open source developer myself.) If HashiCorp didn't like that, they should have made TF proprietary in the first place. But of course they didn't do that: they knew that if they'd done so, they would have gotten very little traction. But now that many people and businesses depend on TF, they've decided to change the rules. Pretty scummy.

gobins 3y ago

> Notably, the three largest companies that most-directly compete with HashiCorp’s managed Terraform offerings, Spacelift, Env0, and Scalr, all have made multi-million dollar pledges to support a fork of Terraform (13 FTEs for five years between these three companies). Wow all these three companies have products offering automation using Terraform. Obviously they would be against the license change.

kstrauser 3y ago
Terraform is only popular because it was open source. It wouldn’t have been 1/10th as widespread if it had started proprietary.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Because it was libre, or because it was (is) gratis? I know that I downloaded and learned Terraform because it was free of charge only. I honestly didn't care and I didn't know about its specific licensing status. I was able to quickly and easily install, configure, and run it because Hashicorp made it available as a free-of-charge download. Period, full stop. Compare it to VirtualBox, which is clearly not F/OSS, but gratis to download and use. In fact my employer mandates our use of VBox, so we all download it, irrespective of license terms. It's extremely popular, even outstripping qemu and other libre VMM implementations.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    It's the guest additions ISO thingy that's not open source.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      > It's the guest additions ISO thingy that's not open source. No, it's the extension pack that is closed source and under a non-GPL license. The guest additions ISO is commonly confused with the extension pack, but they have completely different spheres of influence and functionality. Guest additions is GPLv2, just as the main app is. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

imadethis 3y ago

> That being said, after HashiCorp’s CTO released “binding” answers to some of these FAQs, it seems clear that the only folks who this affects are those that sell software to other companies. I’m not so sure about this. The Licensing FAQ doesn’t have the full legal weight of an update or addendum to the actual license. There’s no guarantee that they won’t renege these “binding” answers next year, and unlike the license agreement my company isn’t agreeing to them as terms of use.

hodgesrm 3y ago
If they are binding why not add them to the license? Rights for GPLv2, Apache 2.0, etc., are defined in one place. That's one of the main strengths of those agreements.
yankput 3y ago
Yeah, some FAQ on some random site doesn’t constitute a license
- charcircuit 3y ago
  hashicorp.com is not a random site. While an FAQ does not necessarily constitute a license, this FAQ Hashicorp is binding so it becomes an extention of it.
  - jclulow 3y ago
    Why don't they just whack it straight in the licence text then?
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      It is via a hyperlink. https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl
      - placatedmayhem 3y ago

rahkiin 3y ago

My biggest concern is the legally untested clause in their BUSL on ‘competing with hashicorp’. I do not know whether I can run Terraform from a production control panel to start new infra for customers. I do not know when this competing might change. Their faq comments are useless: they had a faq item before saying they would be FOSS forever which they removed with this move.

bostik 3y ago
This is the core of the matter. With the language of their license, they have a financial incentive to start offering services that increasingly cover more and more of the possible "bulk" use cases. Your use might have been perfectly fine last week, but can be competing with their new offerings from the beginning of next week.
charcircuit 3y ago
>I do not know whether I can run Terraform from a production control panel to start new infra for customers Is what you are doing competing with Terraform cloud? You can send your questions to licensing@hashicorp.com for clarification.
- trilbyglens 3y ago
  Nice try

kstrauser 3y ago

I replaced “Terraform” with “XFree86” and “OpenTF” with “X.org” as I read it, and the arguments sounded so familiar. “If they fork XF86, users won’t know which product to install. They’ll drift apart and ruin the whole market!” Or maybe everyone will (once again) adopt the truly open version that the majority of contributors switch to. Either way, I’m not too worried about it. Forks of open source projects happen all the time for a thousand reasons. That certainly beats closed stagnation!

dangus 3y ago

Who is this dragon company and what weight does their opinion hold anyway? Most of these reasons to not fork are pretty half-baked. > A schism like this would be devastating for the tool’s adoption Except when it isn’t, like in the case of LibreOffice. Terraform is already by far the most popular in its category. It’s pretty obvious that OpenTF will instantly be the superior choice by the merits of the license alone. HashiCorp will have the support of one company while OpenTF will be backed by multiple companies. Cloud providers like AWS will have an automatic legal incentive to contribute to their providers as a part of the OpenTF project instead of HashiCorp. HashiCorp will be alone on an island. Other parts of this article basically just say “don’t worry, HashiCorp won’t sue you.” Sorry, that’s not as good as free and open source. Yes, HashiCorp is moving too slowly. That’s why they have to use the Oracle army of lawyers method, because most of the value in Terraform Cloud can be replicated in a weekend with a Gitlab template. Print the terraform plan out to the MR comments, use Gitlab’s variable management for secrets, manage your state in the backend of your choice, and that’s pretty much it. Also, the terraform private registry gives you zero benefit over using repository URLs with references to tags/commits/branches. Yet another thing you don’t need terraform cloud for.

klooney 3y ago
They look like a Terraform Enterprise competitor, which makes it all a little weird.

clxfDf 3y ago

TLDR; if we don’t keep TF open source in 5 years everything will become Terraform Cloud - horrible, painful to work with Enterprise-grade BS. I don’t think forking is bad for terraform ecosystems. It might be bad for HashiCorp, but for community in general it can become that source of competition that will make terraform even better. Let’s be honest, most of the modules are made by community, there are thousands of modules out there. HashiCorp recently spent all their love on enterprise related products (like TF Cloud) and almost no love on terraform itself. Our team tried TF Cloud (because it’s HashiCorp, it should be a great product, huh?) and the experience was horrible. If we let HashiCorp do that licensing trick they as a company won’t have any incentives to improve terraform.

coverband 3y ago

I don’t agree at all with the arguments here. Terraform is so widely adopted that it has become a basic, almost built-in component of every cloud ecosystem. Hashicorp would have been better off by treating it as a Trojan horse into enterprises and focusing on its other assets. I expect there will be a newcomer that will take advantage of this mishap and we’ll be talking about their solution next year (unless OpenTF manages to win people over).

codeflo 3y ago

> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products. > A “competitive offering” is a product that is sold to third parties, including through paid support arrangements, that significantly overlaps the capabilities of a HashiCorp commercial product. We all get what they're trying to do. The bad thing is that this isn't only overly broad, but a moving target. I looked at HashiCorp's product page, and they're building up a wide portfolio of IaaS tools. Those are such fundamental tools that even if you're not a cloud provider at all, you're likely to have an overlap in "capabilities" at some point. IMO, IANAL and all that, that's a significant business risk for anyone using Terraform, for any purpose.

buzer 3y ago

> The only companies that need to worry about the license change are those with production products that are “offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp’s products.” That's might be the current situation but it does not mean that will last. If the license changes again or if they e.g. decide stop the development, it will be a lot harder to make a fork in order to e.g. keep up to date with security patches. > these problems with the Terraform core repository are not new > The only material change over the past ~14 days, in our opinion, is that certain business’s have had their margin profile change. Often people deal with things until something breaks camel's back. In this case it was the license change for many companies/users and hopefully it will mean that OpenTF will end up fixing those earlier problems as well.

raffraffraff 3y ago

> HashiCorp could feel forced to strengthen its position and introduce incompatible differences in new releases of Terraform and major-cloud providers I'm sure it's hard to turn FOSS into money. I sympathize. But poisoning the well too discourage competitors will drive everybody away. But could they really? Who actually developed the AWS provider? My biggest problem with terraform over the last few years is that it always feels like they haven't been investing enough development in it. This has been spelled out directly by Terraform employees in their github issues, and it's visible by inference in the way that they disengage from certain issues.

benterix 3y ago

The arguments presented by dragondrop are a classic example of FUD. The author is afraid of what Hashicorp can do if we don't just ignore the license change and pretend nothing happened. Based on that fear, they present various scenarios that seem scary to them. But when you look closer, these fears are ridiculous. For example, "people will be confused whether they should use TF or OpenTF". Guess what: at the beginning everybody will be using TF except a small minority who will consciously chose OpenTF, mostly for development. And they will make sure that, at least at the beginning, the choice will be irrelevant because the compatibility between these two is a top priority. It's like saying in 2004 "You shouldn't release CentOS because people will not be sure if they want to run CentOS or Red Hat". It simply makes no sense. All other arguments are like that.

Woshiwuja 3y ago

[flagged]

stbenjam 3y ago

OpenTF is a good thing. Hashicorp basically stopped reviewing community terraform contributions a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425849 They have no skills in managing true open source projects. We’re better off in an OpenTF World. We don’t need their support.

ringstar 3y ago
> They have no skills in managing true open source projects. We’re better off in an OpenTF World. We don’t need their support. This is so disingenuous. HC started and managed several of the biggest OSS projects out there. They significantly contributed to and evangelized OSS for over a decade. It's easy to say "we don't need their support" when you're piggybacking off of 13 years of their work and money. I think that's what frustrates me about this whole thing. It's not the actual forking of terraform but it's the attitude that the companies and people behind OpenTF have had as they've gone through this. There's been a certain smugness and sense of entitlement that this entire thing gives off which doesn't sit right with me. Don't forget that the main drivers behind this are companies that stand to lose the most (commercially) from the licensing change. It's not as altruistic as they make it seem. I would probably feel better about it if they just came out and said that this impacts their business prospects and as a result they're forking it. But they put this "we're doing this for the community" veil over it which feels disingenuous.
- yuppie_scum 3y ago
  Totally agree. You’ve done a great job articulating my feelings on the matter as someone who writes a lot of TF day in and day out (end user, not an integrator/consultant/etc). Follow the money. Without a workable IaC tool a lot of the backing companies’ business models fail. That’s why they’re treating this like the final act of Les Miserables. HC has done a lot of great work with TF but left themselves open to this competition by not providing better value consulting services or pricing around TF cloud.
goku12 3y ago
You're probably right. But they should find a new name. Terraform is a trademark and it will confuse potential adopters - even if they stick an 'open' in front of it.

nikolay 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
> sociopath You can't post personal attacks here, and that's a doozy. No more of this please. You can easily make your substantive points without it.
- nikolay 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    It's a cliché of internet psychiatric diagnosis, a variety of personal attack that is particularly not allowed here. Please don't do it again. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22internet%20psychiatric%20diagnosis%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
    - nikolay 3y ago
      Then tell me, why did they remove the video? Isn't this confirming my diagnosis?
      - dang 3y ago
        No; but that's irrelevant. The point is please don't post personal attacks to HN.

andreashaerter 3y ago

I think many start-ups use open source mainly as an argument for adoption in the ecosystem, and they have to consider the consequences. Many projects avoid choosing AGPL or GPLv3 licenses to facilitate easier enterprise adoption ('Hey, we can use X and create SaaS without hassle') without generating revenue, while being funded by venture capital and without getting contributions back. Then, when they are adopted, they complain. While the contributions from corporations like HashiCorp are impressive, the overall situation is complex. There's a reason why Linux is still around and growing. From my point of view: Stick with a real, copyleft license that has less adoption by other enterprises and focuses on organic growth instead of VC-driven hypergrowth. Alternatively, be prepared for the consequences that Amazon or other hyperscalers will attract a large number of potential customers using your product without giving anything back. In that case, establish another source of income right away. One has to be realistic: Competing with your open-source product's SaaS against a SaaS by Amazon or other hyperscalers will not work out if that's your only way to make money. Edit: typos, grammar