Lemmy.World

Edit: Acabo de ver la regla de mantener el título del artículo. El título anterior era "Terraform ya no es open source"

Como respuesta algunas empresas y personas que aportaron a TF están haciendo esta propuesta: https://opentf.org/

Si los ~~aweonaos~~ ejectivos de Hashicorp siguen con la idea de cerrar el producto, probablemente salga un fork FOSS.

Hashicorp switches from open source MPL(Mozilla Public License) to BSL(Business Source License). The new license does not allow you to use Hashicorp products if you meet both of the following conditions:

- You are building a product that is competitive with HashiCorp.
- You embed or host Terraform in your product.

What exactly those conditions mean is open for interpretation and companies like Gruntwork are strongly opposed to this change(See relevant article here)

Thread na hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3058732

Red site (50-some comments, high): https://lobste.rs/s/l2l1v8/hashicorp_adopts_business_source

Orange site (600-some, decent): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306

The recent change in licensing across all Hashicorp products shows that Hashicorp is not able to or willing to compete with competitors to their enterprise offerings. Even though they officially don't state it, the change is targeted at competitors such as Spacelift, Scalr, and Env0. Those competitors only came to be to fill in gaps that remained after and because of Hashicorp's lacklustre and overpriced Terraform Cloud/Enterprise products.

The Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 is an open source license, but it has additional vague wording designed to prevent competitors from building competing products using the source code. The problem in this situation is that it also extends to additional products produced by the code owner (Hashicorp). This means even an open-source (non-commercial) competitor to the separate Terraform Enterprise product is not allowed to use the Terraform command, Terraform code-base or any other Hashicorp code-base. Anyone who does any form of Terraform automation, that they then provide to their clients for production use, will now need to ensure they are not seen as a competitor to a Hashicorp product.

Spacelift has already tried to reassure their customers that they are going to work on a solution going forward.

Even though Hashicorp claims to be supportive of the spirit of open source software, they aren't supportive of open collaboration and they have been resistant to upstream contributions from the community. This resistance has created an environment where new enhancement toolsets were created then evolved into competing products with their enterprise offering. Now that they have changed their licensing, this will further exacerbate the issues. A fork of the pre-BSL licensed Terraform code-base has already appeared and if it or another fork gets enough support from the community, we could see the official Terraform toolset being replaced as the defacto Infrastructure-as-Code platform in use today.

I myself have created command wrappers and managements to improve on the limitations of the Terraform command and the lack of state file drift management. So I will be watching what happens closely and be willing to offer my contributions to any potential competitor.

Additional discussions:

Hacker News: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

Hacker News: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

..today we are announcing that HashiCorp is changing its source code license from Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL, also known as BUSL) v1.1 on all future releases of HashiCorp products. HashiCorp APIs, SDKs, and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0.

BSL 1.1 is a source-available license that allows copying, modification, redistribution, non-commercial use, and commercial use under specific conditions. With this change we are following a path similar to other companies in recent years. These companies include Couchbase, Cockroach Labs, Sentry, and MariaDB, which developed this license in 2013. Companies including Confluent, MongoDB, Elastic, Redis Labs, and others have also adopted alternative licenses that include restrictions on commercial usage. In all these cases, the license enables the commercial sponsor to have more control around commercialization.

...

Vendors who provide competitive services built on our community products will no longer be able to incorporate future releases, bug fixes, or security patches contributed to our products.

Our commitment to our community, partners, and customers has not changed. We understand the trust the community places in us and we’ve worked carefully to preserve our original goals in adopting an open approach. We look forward to continuing to invest in the community and our products.

HN Discussion

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.