HashiCorp recently changed Terraform from an open source model to something that requires licensing, so folks got together, forked the code, and created OpenTF.
Imagine using other Hashi products after this, or things built to improve them (eg atlantis or terragrunt). What a stupid way to burn your bridges.
How much do people contribute to Terraform itself as opposed to a Terraform provider, I wonder? I’m biased because I’ve personally contributed to providers (and not Terraform itself), but I perceive providers to really be the meat of the product. For the most part, Terraform largely is just a framework for reconciling resources, but most actual functionality is in those resources themselves, for which all functionality is provided by the provider. e.g., if I wanna make a load balancer and a bunch of VMs, Terraform provides the glue that loads providers and can specify the dependency of the VMs on the LB, but the whole creating of the VMs and LB as well as the diffing and updating are all in the provider.
That’s not to excuse what HashiCorp did, but just I suspect a lot of what people view as “Terraform” isn’t actually the part that HashiCorp controls.
I’m glad they are doing this but in all likelihood most people who use terraform are not offering terraform
to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's productsand can continue to make production use of it.But like I said, I am glad it’s happening - as an insurance policy.
That misses the point, imo. Much of Hashi’s ecosystem was created by people who contributed to the product believing it was community owned, as that’s what the license said.
Oracle tried to do similar when they closed the source for Hudson. Hudson was forked, creating Jenkins, and I would be surprised if folks even remember Hudson today.
Oxide Computing gets into the details on their podcast: https://youtu.be/QaU94LY891M
The OpenTF site itself provides a view on that point: https://opentf.org/#regular-user
And they’re right; while you might consider yourself compliant with today’s version of the license, they can change those terms whenever, and however they like in the future.
I weirdly do remember Hudson from my previous roles as a software developer, but like so many products forked that way it’s barely a footnote in history at this point.
So if there are many contributors to the code they are continuing to use, did they get agreement from all that they could close source? Or does the license not require that?
Well. I feel ignorant. Use Jenkins all the time, never heard of Hudson. Looks like I need to do some readin’.
But yeah, I’m guessing you’re right :)
Removed by mod
I was wondering why their classes have Hudson in the package name. I just never bothered to look it up.
Not true. A ton of these little companies that do “push button cloud” use terraform versus vendor locked-in tools. This license change is just a play to force these companies to pay up, which is shitty.
What about vault? Is there a open source fork?
Bad timing - we have a few people at my company who want to switch from TF to AWS CDK, and this could be the push that makes that happen
