That’s a hot take. Considering their repos has thousands more contributors than they have had employees, ever. Giving the middle finger to literally thousands of people who have contributored to the Hashi core projects, not including the tens of thousands that have contributed to the plugin ecosystem. Many doing it on company time. Many more doing it for free in their spare time. Millions of dollars worth of contributions in developer time over the last 7+ years. That Hashicorp didn’t have to pay a penny for.
Also, I haven't read a lot about this, but I would be very surprised if the Spacelifts of the world could not work out a licensing arrangement.
The actual license at https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl says "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." To me this sounds like a self-hosted version of something could still work with terraform, and you just have to provide the binary yourself vs. it being pre-packaged. IANAL; it would be pretty shitty if they started going after products that support terraform as a tool that way.
Well that does suck. I would also wonder if that's a legal battle they would win.
I've never used Spacelift, etc. so I may be off base with the comparison. But I think about them like specialized CD tools that do nice things with/for terraform. Their value is that you don't have to implement these nice integrations yourself in e.g. Jenkins.
So replace Spacelift with Jenkins. There are some community plugins that idk, facilitate reporting plan impact from code changes. Is Cloudbees now in violation of Hashicorp's license?
It would kind of make sense though? When part of the product you are selling is made and supported by someone else, don't they deserve a part of your income?
I know that FOSS works differently, but that's also the reason why a lot of open source software is of questionable quality. When the development becomes a burden (is not fun anymore) and nobody is compensated, why would someone waste their time on it? Good will only goes that far.
Not suggesting that proprietary software is without faults, but maybe such licenses are a good comprise?
You certainly have to appreciate the irony of Hashi calling others freeloaders, having integrated Open Policy Agent into TFC/TFE and contributing nothing in exchange.
It's also ironic that most of the companies supporting OpenTF have closed-source products, yet they demand that HashiCorp keep their products open source.
env0 founder here, and core member in the OpenTF initiative. Thank you for your note. I wanted to mention that indeed env0 enjoyed Terraform being free, but also contributed back to the Terraform ecosystem, with github.com/env0/terratag OSS and TheIaCPodcast.com for education. Also important to mention another and probably a more important key member in the OpenTF initiative - Gruntwork, creators of Terragrunt and Terratest. I believe we all contributed nicely to the community, especially compared to our size / being small compared to Hashi. Just my 2 cents, in order to add a bit more context to "companies supporting OpenTF have closed-source products".
The core of every HashiCorp product is/was OSS. None of Spacelift is OSS, for example.
I’m not claiming it’s not the same monetization model, but with endless talk from these companies about the commitment to OSS and the virtues of OSS and the benefits HashiCorp has and would continue to receive by keeping their code OSS - it’s just ironic to see most of these companies have no open source code and aren’t actually willing to commit to an OSS model.
I can't say I'm familiar with the other companies/their tools but I assume they're all somewhat nebulous to terraform - did they not try to contribute back to hashicorp terraform?
In the TF scenario specifically it seems like it would have been smarter for hashicorp to open the core oss project to some outside contributors more directly (potentially moving to a different "ownership" on GH).
Maybe they'll relent and throw support behind the new project. Who knows.
Thought the same. I think the uproar is partly manufactured by competitors and freeloaders who are affected by this license change, eg. Spacelift.