18 ms·

Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

255 points by p1nkpineapple 2y ago

lenerdenator 2y ago
Just don't let them hijack it for their own purposes. Sun and MySQL precede them.
benrutter 2y ago
This is a pretty interesting development. Anyone know the userbase/impact of "Oracle EBS"? I don't know much about Oracle's services so can't figure if this is a huge number of users, of a small subset of their clients.
- amiga386 2y ago
  Oracle has a number of departments, but one way you can look at it is: * Oracle Products (e.g. DB, Fusion, E-Business Suite) * Oracle Cloud (OCI) What's telling is that Oracle Cloud's Terraform-as-a-Service (Resource Manager) is still Terraform: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/ResourceManager/Concepts/resourcemanager.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/ResourceManager/C... Clearly, Oracle must think there is some legal distinction between telling Terraform-as-a-service, and selling+distributing a product _containing_ Terraform that end users then use as Terraform-as-a-service.
  - cies 2y ago
    And the biggest department: * Oracle legal
  - mubarkanta 2y ago
    Oracle Cloud's Resource Manager only supports Terraform versions up to 1.2.9 which is already quite old and of course open source. The license changes past the 1.6 versions don't affect the tool at all since it's using such an old version of TF. Version support here: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/ResourceManager/Reference/terraformversions.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/ResourceManager/R... Why Oracle Cloud isn't using Terraform version 1.5.7 which is still open source in Resource Manager is anyone's guess. Perhaps the tool isn't getting much attention recently?
- pwarner 2y ago
  Yeah this sounds like a very narrow use case shifting. That of moving your EBS ERP application to Oracle cloud from on premise. I mean, people are doing that migration and it's exciting if they are actually using iac, but this can't represent large usage of Terraform.
robertlagrant 2y ago
How are Oracle with contributing to OpenTofu upstream?
jph 2y ago
"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream license complications, no more and no less." Oracle wins a big competitive talking point versus IBM, as well as crushing the value of IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp, and completely eliminating IBM's Terraform inroad into a large group of Oracle's enterprise customers.
- pwarner 2y ago
  I think Oracle Linux was a similar approach to let their customers use RedHat Linux without paying RedHat, now also IBM.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Oracle Linux has been a thing for decades. It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed.
    - thelastgallon 2y ago
      > It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed All that’s needed is update sysctl.conf to tune kernel parameters to the workload. Every Linux sysadmin knows how to do this. What kernel parameters need to be updated is heavily documented for any product.
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        Having these pretuned AND having a dedicated support team doing the tuning for you is the killer app for some buyers, as it allowed Admins to concentrate on other work and also minimize management overhead for the Infra org. Spending $500k/yr on compute+support SLA is cheaper than $200k/yr on compute and hiring 3 admins dedicated to that piece of compute. This is the model that every Enterprise Infra vendor pushes (eg. Oracle, AWS, MongoDB, Nvidia), and most mid- and upper-market purchasers are used to it.
loloquwowndueo 2y ago
A giant corporation like Oracle switching to the fork because they don’t want to engage commercially with Hashicorp is peak greedy.
- klysm 2y ago
  How? It seems entirely sensible
  - brabel 2y ago
    They seem to think that just because a company makes non-open-source software, it shouldn't itself prefer to use open-source rather than proprietary software?! That makes no sense, of course. Specially considering the non-OSS is now owned by IBM which directly competes with Oracle on multiple fronts. It seems to me that OpenTofu is actually backed by many companies in a similar position to Oracle, which don't want to have to rely on IBM for things they have tight integrations with.
- trueismywork 2y ago
  More than the money, it's the license servers that make your life miserable
- m1keil 2y ago
  It is not Oracle who are using terraform, it is their customers. Terraform is the underline tech that powers the tooling suit that the customers use to manage their oracle cloud. It makes perfect sense for them to push their customers to move to the more permissive licensing to avoid any legal issues.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Only when it isn't legal issues that dump money into Oracle. They absolutely love and adore pushing their customers to less permissive licensing which can encounter legal issues when they are the ones benefiting
    - 2y ago
Lockal 2y ago
"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream license complications, no more and no less." Hm, with that logic they could dump MySQL in favor of MariaDB as well
- croes 2y ago
  Oracle owns MySQL but not Terraform
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Ah, so they meant avoiding 'downstream license complications' they don't cause.
    - baobun 2y ago
      I wouldn't expect Oracle to have a license complication with itself...
      - dijit 2y ago
        it's mostly just hypocritical. If everyone acted like Oracle; there would be no mysql users. Which is the point being made.
        snapcaster 2y ago
        I don't understand your comment. Oracle is hypocritical because like every company they take everything they can and give the minimum they have to? which part is hypocritical?
        dijit 2y ago
        I'm incredulous that you don't understand, but I'll humour you. Let's see; If I giving away a product because I think it's for the betterment of mankind, and definitely not an attempt to rug-pull or anything like that: no, just for developer good will. Then I am offered a free service, and I do not use it for fear that there could potentially be some rugpulling, despite having a reputation for that myself: and the project I'm considering having no reputation for that. Then the pretense in which I "give away" my software, is morally dubious. I would never permit myself to be in the same situation as I need others to be in order for my product to be successful. MySQL/Virtualbox/Java etc;
ig1 2y ago
Following IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp the moves seems unsurprising, they wouldn't want to be beholden to a competitor. We'll inevitably see others large companies follow suite - it was one thing when hashicorp was independent tech company but it's very different when it's owned by a direct competitor.
- cies 2y ago
  IBM prolly got them to agree to do the re-licensing move "as Hashicorp" as part of the take over deal. So it would not look bad on IBM.
  - alemanek 2y ago
    From what I have read Hashicorp did this relicensing since IBM was reselling Vault at scale in IBM cloud. They wanted to force IBM and other cloud providers to pay them instead I believe. IBM employees then initiated the fork of vault which is called openbao. Later IBM buys Hashicorp. The fork might have just been an attempt at leverage in the negotiations but it remains to be seen if it will live on.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  OpenTofu hard forked, it's going to be interesting to see what happens if IBM rolls back the licensing changes.
- tw04 2y ago
  >they wouldn't want to be beholden to a competitor. Which is ironic given that OEL is a direct rip-off of RHEL which IBM also now owns.
rswail 2y ago
Oracle making the change due to licensing is like a dictionary definition of hubris, considering how their own license enforcement operates.
- manishsharan 2y ago
  They wrote the playbook. They know what's coming. Ruthless and smart!
- cies 2y ago
  As much as I dislike Oracle's biz practices (I'd not touch their db product with a stick), they do a lot of FLOSS devt: https://opensource.oracle.com/ https://opensource.oracle.com/ (almost endless list) But then they have take FLOSS projects and abandoned them, see OOo for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#/media/File:StarOffice_major_derivatives.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#/media/File:...
  - thayne 2y ago
    Looking through that list, most of the big projects (OpenJDK, Mysql, Opengrok) were inherited as part of acquisitions.
    - chasil 2y ago
      Oracle has been a prolific contributor to the Linux kernel. https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contributor-to-the-linux-kernel https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contribu... XFS is really important for (their) database performance, so quite a lot comes out of Oracle for it. You might also know that btrfs began at Oracle. https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+blog+xfs https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+blog+xfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs "Chris Mason, an engineer working on ReiserFS for SUSE at the time, joined Oracle later that year and began work on a new file system based on these B-trees."
    - nirvdrum 2y ago
      > Looking through that list, most of the big projects (OpenJDK, Mysql, Opengrok) were inherited as part of acquisitions. I see this argument a lot, but I'm not sure how it detracts from their continued development. Oracle funds many engineers working on OSS and, despite having CLAs in place, retain the permissive license for most of them. In some cases they've acquired closed source software and made it open source (e.g., JRockit stuff). They're a major contributor to OSS.
8organicbits 2y ago
We're seeing an uptick in open source projects getting relicenced to non-open licenses. Some projects are successfully forked and the userbase shifts, other times not. One theory of mine is that we can measure the risk that a project will be relicensed by looking at things like diversity of contributors, trademark ownership, contributor agreements, and license terms. Low risk projects include the Linux kernel (GPL, DCO) [1]. High risk projects include Kubernetes (Apache, CLA) [2]. If this trend continues developers will need to get a better understanding of how relicencing works and may decide to avoid contributing to projects with elevated risk. [1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/linux/ https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/linux/ [2] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/kubernetes/ https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/kubernetes/
- janosdebugs 2y ago
  I wonder how accurate this assessment is since the Linux Foundation is a non-profit.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- cies 2y ago
  Dual licensing also makes it IMHO less likely that a project "continues as proprietary". Example: Qt. I think "contributor agreements" are the biggest red flag. Though I like them for potentially upgrading a license (say from GPLv2 to v3), not that this always is a good thing.
  - aragilar 2y ago
    It's also worth mentioning the specific agreement between KDE and Qt (https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ and https://www.qt.io/faq/3.2.-why-do-you-have-an-agreement-with-kde-about-your-licensing-what-kde-is-and-whats-the-history-of-qt-and-kde https://www.qt.io/faq/3.2.-why-do-you-have-an-agreement-with...), which shifts the incentives as well.
datadeft 2y ago
I wish there was a type safe, algebraic data type using Terraform alternative.
- ParetoOptimal 2y ago
  You can use dhall for terraform, but no idea if UX for it got better.
- cies 2y ago
  There are Java and C# (somewhat typesafe imho) and this (Kotlin, reasonably typesafe imho): https://github.com/VirtuslabRnD/pulumi-kotlin https://github.com/VirtuslabRnD/pulumi-kotlin For Pulumi. When I see the pulumi-kotlin example code I much prefer it over my Terraform scripts. (We picked TF before Pulumi was an option, and waaaaay before it had reasonably typesafe lang support)
  - andrewfromx 2y ago
    +1 for pulumi! https://thenewstack.io/pulumi-launches-new-infrastructure-lifecycle-features/ https://thenewstack.io/pulumi-launches-new-infrastructure-li...
  - jpgvm 2y ago
    I made this suck less last year and it was just recently merged: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-java/pull/1231 https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-java/pull/1231 This lets you use Pulumi w/Gradle multi-project builds in Kotlin script.
- maineldc 2y ago
  We use typescript + pulumi for this. It's pretty amazing. And Pulumi uses Terraform modules under the hood so you get the full power of Terraform with the goodness of Typescript. Even self hosting your state management in a bucket is simpler with Pulumi since it uses lock files on S3 versus a separate DyanamoDB + S3 combo. I have been using it in production for 4-5 years and used Terraform for several years before that.
skywhopper 2y ago
The article is somewhat confusing but it sounds like Oracle packages a cloud infrastructure management tool that’s based on Terraform. Presumably it’s built on 1.6, which was still MPL. Since they offer this product as a service, it directly falls under the restrictions HashiCorp put into place to prevent competition from repackagers and SaaS offerings of their products. So to move forward with upgrading the Terraform support in their tool, Oracle had two choices: pay HashiCorp (soon IBM) a hefty license fee to resell Terraform, or use OpenTofu which is free and has now proven to be well-run enough to issue a new release with both Terraform compatibility and OpenTofu-specific enhancements, while dodging lazy accusations of code theft from HashiCorp. This is a no-brainer for Oracle, and it’s great news for the future of OpenTofu.
- empressplay 2y ago
  It will be interesting to see what IBM's army of lawyers think about those lazy accusations of code theft ;)
nunez 2y ago
Fortunately using OpenTofu is just s/terraform/opentofu/g at this point.
JohnMakin 2y ago
been using terraform heavily for 5 years and have hacked together modules and custom providers for various ad-hoc things. One of the things that has always really frustrated me about terraform is that it seems to go out of its way to make you do things in a very annoying, inconsistent way. Part of this is necessary due to the nature of the provider ecosystem, you can't guarantee consistency across providers - and I won't burden this post with my gripes about inconsistencies and annoyances within providers, such as the AWS provider. Really though the interface has always been terrible (IMO). Stuff like iterating through a nested map using a for loop, which is trivial in most languages, is annoying and obtuse to the point of comedy. God help you if this map contains mixed types. Novices have trouble picking it up in general. It's very easy to start a project that sprawls completely out of control, and there doesn't seem to be a standard at all as to how to organize projects/code, so each terraform project I inherit is wildly different and has its own seemingly unique pain points. A lot of this has gotten better over the years with QoL improvements within terraform itself - but really, as a developer, I've gotten more than a little tired about the hubris that Hashicorp shows with some of the stuff around the terraform ecosystem. Features that people beg for routinely get told by maintainers that they will not be doing that because reasons or because "it's not possible" (such as dynamic provider blocks). OpenTofu is already tackling many of the gripes and feature requests I've had over the years and are doing so eagerly and have some heavy hitters behind it. Terraform is good, but it was always going to be vulnerable to competition - It's basically just a state-based wrapper around cloud API's. A great idea, but easy to duplicate. I don't know what they were thinking trying to put this behind a walled garden when they could have used it to get people into the hashicorp ecosystem and sell their other enterprise products.
- hamandcheese 2y ago
  What really grinds my gears is how hard it is to refactor terraform code. Put something in a module, but want to move it elsewhere? Get ready for pain. I've been using terranix, which uses nix to generate a tf.json file, and oh my god is the experience night and day. I can make functions! I can refactor! And if it's a pure refactor, there is nothing to apply.
  - 2y ago
cube2222 2y ago
It's great to see more companies adopting OpenTofu, and especially larger ones! As a side note, we've recently released OpenTofu 1.7 with end-to-end state encryption, enhanced provider-defined functions, and a bunch more[0]. If you've been holding out with the migration, now is the perfect moment to take another look, and join the many companies that have already migrated! [0]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/releases/tag/v1.7.0 https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/releases/tag/v1.7.0 Note: Tech Lead of the OpenTofu project, always happy to answer any questions
- x86a 2y ago
  I'm really excited to see the end-to-end state encryption. I've always thought it was bizarre that Hashicorp didn't prioritize this.
  - _w1tm 2y ago
    Could it be because it weakens the business case for using their SAAS?
    - x86a 2y ago
      Possibly, but we are paying enterprise customers (but not using HCP) and this still isn't possible. Seems like an obvious thing they could have at least offered to vault enterprise or TF enterprise customers years ago.
  - depr 2y ago
    My guess is internal politics in the development team(s) rather than commercial reasons.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  Are there any incompatibilities cropping up between terraform and opentofu? I believe we're on terraform 1.7.5, I'm not sold on migrating yet but would like to keep the option open, especially if something like delaying an upgrade would help not have future backwards incompatible things to fix. I understand why people were upset about licensing changes but I was not one of them who were particularly bothered. Why should I switch?
zug_zug 2y ago
Slightly off-topic, but one of my greatest pet-peeves of working in devops is every few years a new "killer tech" comes out that some contingent of very-highly-opinionated (though not always very senior) people insists is life-and-death stakes and wants the whole company to move to (e.g. terraform). Too often it's a failure. Too often it has some upsides, but also is a LOT of work that is discovered over time. Too often it's seen as good BUT now some incompatible new version or alternative requires the whole debacle start again. I only want to learn technologies that will be relevant until the day I retire, otherwise I'm not advancing, it's all just a treadmill.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Welcome to technology. Yes, I too wish I could make a living programming in 65C02 assembly on my Apple //e like I did in 1986. I also don’t see any reason I have to learn about S3 instead of storing all of my files on an on prem CDRW jukebox
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    No, it's not inevitable. There are many technologies that will outlast my whole career: java, sql, tcp/ip, linux, to name a few. S3 will also certainly be around in 20 years.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      That’s true. But when I was first learning Java, Java beans and Java Server Pages were the hotness. The last time I did production code in Java was writing Android apps that required knowing the Android SDK. Programming in Java in 2024 is nothing like it was in the 1990s when it was first embedded in Netscape Navigator - yeah I played around with it back then. When I was first using C and C++, I was writing Windows apps with MFC in 1999. Good luck if that’s all you know in 2024z I’ve been at this awhile. I started writing C and Fortran apps on DEC Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes in 1996z My second job was part development and part managing Windows servers on prem running IIS and Classic ASP. I got my first, only, and hopefully last job at BigTech in the cloud consulting department at 46 (full time role) consulting companies on all of the latest “serverless” goodness. Either evolve or end up complaining on HN about “ageism”. When I got Amazoned at 49 last year, it took all of three weeks to have multiple offers. I’ll put my buzzword compliance against anyone of any age in my niches. While “tcp/ip” will be around as will assembly language. I’ve programmed in assembly language on five different architectures either professionally or as hobby. I haven’t touched it since 2008. Jobs are at a higher level of abstraction these days.
dylmye 2y ago
I just wish Terraform would let me be a grown up and see sensitive values in an output without going through so many hoops.
darknavi 2y ago
> What is OpenTofu? > > OpenTofu is a Terraform fork, created as an initiative of Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr, and others, in response to HashiCorp’s switch from an open-source license to the BUSL. The initiative has many supporters, all of whom are listed here. I still have no idea what I am looking at. I know that probably means this product isn't for me, but it peeves me when products do this. "What is X? X is like Y!"
- outside1234 2y ago
  OpenTofu is Terraform
- erik_seaberg 2y ago
  Infra as code. Write a template for a Spanner table in your GCP account. If it doesn't already exist, OpenTofu will notice and offer to send the API call to create it. It's like using AWS CloudFormation or GCP Deployment Manager, but supports quite a few cloud vendors with the same tools.
Gowiem 2y ago
The move towards OpenTofu is going to be a slow tide, but it is coming. It's an easy migration, the team behind OpenTofu is showing that they're strong, and the community opinion is most definitely shifting in their favor. We made the jump for one client, started a new client project with tofu, and are starting to migrate another client this week. Good info on our experience here: https://masterpoint.io/updates/opentofu-early-adopters/ https://masterpoint.io/updates/opentofu-early-adopters/
em1sar 2y ago
[dead]

255 points by p1nkpineapple 2y ago

Just don't let them hijack it for their own purposes. Sun and MySQL precede them.

This is a pretty interesting development. Anyone know the userbase/impact of "Oracle EBS"? I don't know much about Oracle's services so can't figure if this is a huge number of users, of a small subset of their clients.

amiga386 2y ago
Oracle has a number of departments, but one way you can look at it is: * Oracle Products (e.g. DB, Fusion, E-Business Suite) * Oracle Cloud (OCI) What's telling is that Oracle Cloud's Terraform-as-a-Service (Resource Manager) is still Terraform: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/ResourceManager/Concepts/resourcemanager.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/ResourceManager/C... Clearly, Oracle must think there is some legal distinction between telling Terraform-as-a-service, and selling+distributing a product _containing_ Terraform that end users then use as Terraform-as-a-service.
- cies 2y ago
  And the biggest department: * Oracle legal
- mubarkanta 2y ago
  Oracle Cloud's Resource Manager only supports Terraform versions up to 1.2.9 which is already quite old and of course open source. The license changes past the 1.6 versions don't affect the tool at all since it's using such an old version of TF. Version support here: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/ResourceManager/Reference/terraformversions.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/ResourceManager/R... Why Oracle Cloud isn't using Terraform version 1.5.7 which is still open source in Resource Manager is anyone's guess. Perhaps the tool isn't getting much attention recently?
pwarner 2y ago
Yeah this sounds like a very narrow use case shifting. That of moving your EBS ERP application to Oracle cloud from on premise. I mean, people are doing that migration and it's exciting if they are actually using iac, but this can't represent large usage of Terraform.

robertlagrant 2y ago

How are Oracle with contributing to OpenTofu upstream?

jph 2y ago

"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream license complications, no more and no less." Oracle wins a big competitive talking point versus IBM, as well as crushing the value of IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp, and completely eliminating IBM's Terraform inroad into a large group of Oracle's enterprise customers.

pwarner 2y ago
I think Oracle Linux was a similar approach to let their customers use RedHat Linux without paying RedHat, now also IBM.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Oracle Linux has been a thing for decades. It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed.
  - thelastgallon 2y ago
    > It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed All that’s needed is update sysctl.conf to tune kernel parameters to the workload. Every Linux sysadmin knows how to do this. What kernel parameters need to be updated is heavily documented for any product.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      Having these pretuned AND having a dedicated support team doing the tuning for you is the killer app for some buyers, as it allowed Admins to concentrate on other work and also minimize management overhead for the Infra org. Spending $500k/yr on compute+support SLA is cheaper than $200k/yr on compute and hiring 3 admins dedicated to that piece of compute. This is the model that every Enterprise Infra vendor pushes (eg. Oracle, AWS, MongoDB, Nvidia), and most mid- and upper-market purchasers are used to it.

loloquwowndueo 2y ago

A giant corporation like Oracle switching to the fork because they don’t want to engage commercially with Hashicorp is peak greedy.

klysm 2y ago
How? It seems entirely sensible
- brabel 2y ago
  They seem to think that just because a company makes non-open-source software, it shouldn't itself prefer to use open-source rather than proprietary software?! That makes no sense, of course. Specially considering the non-OSS is now owned by IBM which directly competes with Oracle on multiple fronts. It seems to me that OpenTofu is actually backed by many companies in a similar position to Oracle, which don't want to have to rely on IBM for things they have tight integrations with.
trueismywork 2y ago
More than the money, it's the license servers that make your life miserable
m1keil 2y ago
It is not Oracle who are using terraform, it is their customers. Terraform is the underline tech that powers the tooling suit that the customers use to manage their oracle cloud. It makes perfect sense for them to push their customers to move to the more permissive licensing to avoid any legal issues.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Only when it isn't legal issues that dump money into Oracle. They absolutely love and adore pushing their customers to less permissive licensing which can encounter legal issues when they are the ones benefiting
  - 2y ago

Lockal 2y ago

croes 2y ago
Oracle owns MySQL but not Terraform
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Ah, so they meant avoiding 'downstream license complications' they don't cause.
  - baobun 2y ago
    I wouldn't expect Oracle to have a license complication with itself...
    - dijit 2y ago
      it's mostly just hypocritical. If everyone acted like Oracle; there would be no mysql users. Which is the point being made.
      - snapcaster 2y ago
        I don't understand your comment. Oracle is hypocritical because like every company they take everything they can and give the minimum they have to? which part is hypocritical?
        dijit 2y ago
        I'm incredulous that you don't understand, but I'll humour you. Let's see; If I giving away a product because I think it's for the betterment of mankind, and definitely not an attempt to rug-pull or anything like that: no, just for developer good will. Then I am offered a free service, and I do not use it for fear that there could potentially be some rugpulling, despite having a reputation for that myself: and the project I'm considering having no reputation for that. Then the pretense in which I "give away" my software, is morally dubious. I would never permit myself to be in the same situation as I need others to be in order for my product to be successful. MySQL/Virtualbox/Java etc;

ig1 2y ago

Following IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp the moves seems unsurprising, they wouldn't want to be beholden to a competitor. We'll inevitably see others large companies follow suite - it was one thing when hashicorp was independent tech company but it's very different when it's owned by a direct competitor.

cies 2y ago
IBM prolly got them to agree to do the re-licensing move "as Hashicorp" as part of the take over deal. So it would not look bad on IBM.
- alemanek 2y ago
  From what I have read Hashicorp did this relicensing since IBM was reselling Vault at scale in IBM cloud. They wanted to force IBM and other cloud providers to pay them instead I believe. IBM employees then initiated the fork of vault which is called openbao. Later IBM buys Hashicorp. The fork might have just been an attempt at leverage in the negotiations but it remains to be seen if it will live on.
candiddevmike 2y ago
OpenTofu hard forked, it's going to be interesting to see what happens if IBM rolls back the licensing changes.
tw04 2y ago
>they wouldn't want to be beholden to a competitor. Which is ironic given that OEL is a direct rip-off of RHEL which IBM also now owns.

rswail 2y ago

Oracle making the change due to licensing is like a dictionary definition of hubris, considering how their own license enforcement operates.

manishsharan 2y ago
They wrote the playbook. They know what's coming. Ruthless and smart!
cies 2y ago
As much as I dislike Oracle's biz practices (I'd not touch their db product with a stick), they do a lot of FLOSS devt: https://opensource.oracle.com/ https://opensource.oracle.com/ (almost endless list) But then they have take FLOSS projects and abandoned them, see OOo for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#/media/File:StarOffice_major_derivatives.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#/media/File:...
- thayne 2y ago
  Looking through that list, most of the big projects (OpenJDK, Mysql, Opengrok) were inherited as part of acquisitions.
  - chasil 2y ago
    Oracle has been a prolific contributor to the Linux kernel. https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contributor-to-the-linux-kernel https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contribu... XFS is really important for (their) database performance, so quite a lot comes out of Oracle for it. You might also know that btrfs began at Oracle. https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+blog+xfs https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+blog+xfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs "Chris Mason, an engineer working on ReiserFS for SUSE at the time, joined Oracle later that year and began work on a new file system based on these B-trees."
  - nirvdrum 2y ago
    > Looking through that list, most of the big projects (OpenJDK, Mysql, Opengrok) were inherited as part of acquisitions. I see this argument a lot, but I'm not sure how it detracts from their continued development. Oracle funds many engineers working on OSS and, despite having CLAs in place, retain the permissive license for most of them. In some cases they've acquired closed source software and made it open source (e.g., JRockit stuff). They're a major contributor to OSS.

8organicbits 2y ago

We're seeing an uptick in open source projects getting relicenced to non-open licenses. Some projects are successfully forked and the userbase shifts, other times not. One theory of mine is that we can measure the risk that a project will be relicensed by looking at things like diversity of contributors, trademark ownership, contributor agreements, and license terms. Low risk projects include the Linux kernel (GPL, DCO) [1]. High risk projects include Kubernetes (Apache, CLA) [2]. If this trend continues developers will need to get a better understanding of how relicencing works and may decide to avoid contributing to projects with elevated risk. [1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/linux/ https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/linux/ [2] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/kubernetes/ https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/kubernetes/

janosdebugs 2y ago
I wonder how accurate this assessment is since the Linux Foundation is a non-profit.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cies 2y ago
Dual licensing also makes it IMHO less likely that a project "continues as proprietary". Example: Qt. I think "contributor agreements" are the biggest red flag. Though I like them for potentially upgrading a license (say from GPLv2 to v3), not that this always is a good thing.
- aragilar 2y ago
  It's also worth mentioning the specific agreement between KDE and Qt (https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ and https://www.qt.io/faq/3.2.-why-do-you-have-an-agreement-with-kde-about-your-licensing-what-kde-is-and-whats-the-history-of-qt-and-kde https://www.qt.io/faq/3.2.-why-do-you-have-an-agreement-with...), which shifts the incentives as well.

datadeft 2y ago

I wish there was a type safe, algebraic data type using Terraform alternative.

ParetoOptimal 2y ago
You can use dhall for terraform, but no idea if UX for it got better.
cies 2y ago
There are Java and C# (somewhat typesafe imho) and this (Kotlin, reasonably typesafe imho): https://github.com/VirtuslabRnD/pulumi-kotlin https://github.com/VirtuslabRnD/pulumi-kotlin For Pulumi. When I see the pulumi-kotlin example code I much prefer it over my Terraform scripts. (We picked TF before Pulumi was an option, and waaaaay before it had reasonably typesafe lang support)
- andrewfromx 2y ago
  +1 for pulumi! https://thenewstack.io/pulumi-launches-new-infrastructure-lifecycle-features/ https://thenewstack.io/pulumi-launches-new-infrastructure-li...
- jpgvm 2y ago
  I made this suck less last year and it was just recently merged: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-java/pull/1231 https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-java/pull/1231 This lets you use Pulumi w/Gradle multi-project builds in Kotlin script.
maineldc 2y ago
We use typescript + pulumi for this. It's pretty amazing. And Pulumi uses Terraform modules under the hood so you get the full power of Terraform with the goodness of Typescript. Even self hosting your state management in a bucket is simpler with Pulumi since it uses lock files on S3 versus a separate DyanamoDB + S3 combo. I have been using it in production for 4-5 years and used Terraform for several years before that.

skywhopper 2y ago

The article is somewhat confusing but it sounds like Oracle packages a cloud infrastructure management tool that’s based on Terraform. Presumably it’s built on 1.6, which was still MPL. Since they offer this product as a service, it directly falls under the restrictions HashiCorp put into place to prevent competition from repackagers and SaaS offerings of their products. So to move forward with upgrading the Terraform support in their tool, Oracle had two choices: pay HashiCorp (soon IBM) a hefty license fee to resell Terraform, or use OpenTofu which is free and has now proven to be well-run enough to issue a new release with both Terraform compatibility and OpenTofu-specific enhancements, while dodging lazy accusations of code theft from HashiCorp. This is a no-brainer for Oracle, and it’s great news for the future of OpenTofu.

empressplay 2y ago
It will be interesting to see what IBM's army of lawyers think about those lazy accusations of code theft ;)

nunez 2y ago

Fortunately using OpenTofu is just s/terraform/opentofu/g at this point.

JohnMakin 2y ago

been using terraform heavily for 5 years and have hacked together modules and custom providers for various ad-hoc things. One of the things that has always really frustrated me about terraform is that it seems to go out of its way to make you do things in a very annoying, inconsistent way. Part of this is necessary due to the nature of the provider ecosystem, you can't guarantee consistency across providers - and I won't burden this post with my gripes about inconsistencies and annoyances within providers, such as the AWS provider. Really though the interface has always been terrible (IMO). Stuff like iterating through a nested map using a for loop, which is trivial in most languages, is annoying and obtuse to the point of comedy. God help you if this map contains mixed types. Novices have trouble picking it up in general. It's very easy to start a project that sprawls completely out of control, and there doesn't seem to be a standard at all as to how to organize projects/code, so each terraform project I inherit is wildly different and has its own seemingly unique pain points. A lot of this has gotten better over the years with QoL improvements within terraform itself - but really, as a developer, I've gotten more than a little tired about the hubris that Hashicorp shows with some of the stuff around the terraform ecosystem. Features that people beg for routinely get told by maintainers that they will not be doing that because reasons or because "it's not possible" (such as dynamic provider blocks). OpenTofu is already tackling many of the gripes and feature requests I've had over the years and are doing so eagerly and have some heavy hitters behind it. Terraform is good, but it was always going to be vulnerable to competition - It's basically just a state-based wrapper around cloud API's. A great idea, but easy to duplicate. I don't know what they were thinking trying to put this behind a walled garden when they could have used it to get people into the hashicorp ecosystem and sell their other enterprise products.

hamandcheese 2y ago
What really grinds my gears is how hard it is to refactor terraform code. Put something in a module, but want to move it elsewhere? Get ready for pain. I've been using terranix, which uses nix to generate a tf.json file, and oh my god is the experience night and day. I can make functions! I can refactor! And if it's a pure refactor, there is nothing to apply.
- 2y ago

cube2222 2y ago

It's great to see more companies adopting OpenTofu, and especially larger ones! As a side note, we've recently released OpenTofu 1.7 with end-to-end state encryption, enhanced provider-defined functions, and a bunch more[0]. If you've been holding out with the migration, now is the perfect moment to take another look, and join the many companies that have already migrated! [0]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/releases/tag/v1.7.0 https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/releases/tag/v1.7.0 Note: Tech Lead of the OpenTofu project, always happy to answer any questions

x86a 2y ago
I'm really excited to see the end-to-end state encryption. I've always thought it was bizarre that Hashicorp didn't prioritize this.
- _w1tm 2y ago
  Could it be because it weakens the business case for using their SAAS?
  - x86a 2y ago
    Possibly, but we are paying enterprise customers (but not using HCP) and this still isn't possible. Seems like an obvious thing they could have at least offered to vault enterprise or TF enterprise customers years ago.
- depr 2y ago
  My guess is internal politics in the development team(s) rather than commercial reasons.
colechristensen 2y ago
Are there any incompatibilities cropping up between terraform and opentofu? I believe we're on terraform 1.7.5, I'm not sold on migrating yet but would like to keep the option open, especially if something like delaying an upgrade would help not have future backwards incompatible things to fix. I understand why people were upset about licensing changes but I was not one of them who were particularly bothered. Why should I switch?

zug_zug 2y ago

Slightly off-topic, but one of my greatest pet-peeves of working in devops is every few years a new "killer tech" comes out that some contingent of very-highly-opinionated (though not always very senior) people insists is life-and-death stakes and wants the whole company to move to (e.g. terraform). Too often it's a failure. Too often it has some upsides, but also is a LOT of work that is discovered over time. Too often it's seen as good BUT now some incompatible new version or alternative requires the whole debacle start again. I only want to learn technologies that will be relevant until the day I retire, otherwise I'm not advancing, it's all just a treadmill.

scarface_74 2y ago
Welcome to technology. Yes, I too wish I could make a living programming in 65C02 assembly on my Apple //e like I did in 1986. I also don’t see any reason I have to learn about S3 instead of storing all of my files on an on prem CDRW jukebox
- zug_zug 2y ago
  No, it's not inevitable. There are many technologies that will outlast my whole career: java, sql, tcp/ip, linux, to name a few. S3 will also certainly be around in 20 years.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    That’s true. But when I was first learning Java, Java beans and Java Server Pages were the hotness. The last time I did production code in Java was writing Android apps that required knowing the Android SDK. Programming in Java in 2024 is nothing like it was in the 1990s when it was first embedded in Netscape Navigator - yeah I played around with it back then. When I was first using C and C++, I was writing Windows apps with MFC in 1999. Good luck if that’s all you know in 2024z I’ve been at this awhile. I started writing C and Fortran apps on DEC Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes in 1996z My second job was part development and part managing Windows servers on prem running IIS and Classic ASP. I got my first, only, and hopefully last job at BigTech in the cloud consulting department at 46 (full time role) consulting companies on all of the latest “serverless” goodness. Either evolve or end up complaining on HN about “ageism”. When I got Amazoned at 49 last year, it took all of three weeks to have multiple offers. I’ll put my buzzword compliance against anyone of any age in my niches. While “tcp/ip” will be around as will assembly language. I’ve programmed in assembly language on five different architectures either professionally or as hobby. I haven’t touched it since 2008. Jobs are at a higher level of abstraction these days.

dylmye 2y ago

I just wish Terraform would let me be a grown up and see sensitive values in an output without going through so many hoops.

darknavi 2y ago

> What is OpenTofu? > > OpenTofu is a Terraform fork, created as an initiative of Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr, and others, in response to HashiCorp’s switch from an open-source license to the BUSL. The initiative has many supporters, all of whom are listed here. I still have no idea what I am looking at. I know that probably means this product isn't for me, but it peeves me when products do this. "What is X? X is like Y!"

outside1234 2y ago
OpenTofu is Terraform
erik_seaberg 2y ago
Infra as code. Write a template for a Spanner table in your GCP account. If it doesn't already exist, OpenTofu will notice and offer to send the API call to create it. It's like using AWS CloudFormation or GCP Deployment Manager, but supports quite a few cloud vendors with the same tools.

Gowiem 2y ago

The move towards OpenTofu is going to be a slow tide, but it is coming. It's an easy migration, the team behind OpenTofu is showing that they're strong, and the community opinion is most definitely shifting in their favor. We made the jump for one client, started a new client project with tofu, and are starting to migrate another client this week. Good info on our experience here: https://masterpoint.io/updates/opentofu-early-adopters/ https://masterpoint.io/updates/opentofu-early-adopters/

em1sar 2y ago

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