[HN Gopher] The Beginning of the End for Terraform?
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The Beginning of the End for Terraform?
Author : lockedinspace
Score : 16 points
Date : 2024-04-27 18:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| mrbishalsaha wrote:
| I guess most companies now a days just say open-source to get
| some initial traction, nut no worries it will get a fork like
| redis did if they change the license.
| lockedinspace wrote:
| There's already a fork, OpenTofu https://opentofu.org/
| mrbishalsaha wrote:
| Why is it happening so often now? Most OS companies changing
| their licenses...?
| dudus wrote:
| Because historically they made money selling managed
| version of their services.
|
| Now GCP, AWS and Azure just sell a superior managed version
| for cheaper. So they lost their income stream.
|
| Open source products tried to change the license so the big
| guys would at least have to pay them something to make
| money on their work.
| dakiol wrote:
| Isn't that problem easily solved by adding to your open
| source project's license: "FAANG companies (like Google,
| etc.) cannot use or make profit from this project" ?
|
| Better stated, of course, but you get the point.
| paulv wrote:
| That change makes it no longer free/open source.
| mrbishalsaha wrote:
| They can just open subsidiaries and use that to go around
| them. Also the big guys do donate a lot of money.
|
| The real reason might be VCs. The companies going closed
| source have raised from VCs and they are pushed to more
| and more growth just changing licenses and taking
| control.
| lijok wrote:
| There isn't a well known / widely accepted license with
| such clauses (afaik, happy to be corrected). Noone other
| than individual tinkerers will ever touch anything with a
| custom license or any license ambiguity for that matter.
|
| Meta's LlaMa for example is "OSS" but under a custom
| license which effectively prohibits hyperscalers from
| using it
| sethops1 wrote:
| I mean that's basically what they're doing. The BUSL
| license these projects are using boil down to "you can't
| resell the project against us". But that's a non-starter
| for many folks and the companies using such a license are
| the devil.
| tensor wrote:
| Yes, there is far too much ambiguity in these licenses.
| Especially because you never know what will happen in the
| future. You could be found to be in competition after
| they launch a new product or new feature, years after not
| being in competition. At that point changing out their
| product could be too challenging, forcing you into
| arbitrarily expensive commercial license agreements.
|
| Certainly one of the reasons why open source is popular
| in software is that it gives you options for maintenance
| prices. You can do it yourself or pay any number of
| consulting agencies to do it for you, or the creators of
| the software. When it becomes locked to one vendor
| suddenly the market economics change hugely. Now that
| vendor can crank the price up extremely high, basically
| until just before the point your willing to engage in a
| hugely expensive software refactor to move to a different
| product.
|
| Open standards were supposed to help make it easier to
| move to new products, but in reality, it rarely is that
| clean. E.g. look at SQL, while it's easier maybe to move
| from one SQL database to another than from one completely
| custom database to another, it's still a massive amount
| of work due to details of each SQL server.
| dudus wrote:
| That's exactly what Terraform and Redis did.
|
| The open source license is designed to guarantee your
| liberties. The moment you start to remove some liberties
| you have neutered it.
| NilMostChill wrote:
| i found this useful for related general background
| information as well as some interesting conclusions, though
| you should probably decide for yourself if you think they
| are something you agree with.
|
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/corporate-open-
| source...
|
| If you prefer video, this is actually a transcription of
| the youtube video here :
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNcBk6cwim8
| lijok wrote:
| If anything Terraform will get reinvigorated. I'd bet IBM will
| reverse the license change by the end of the year.
|
| > This leads me to my first concern, IBM has a conflict of
| interest. IBM has a cloud offering, admittedly with a 1.8% market
| share. Why would they want to keep developing tools that frankly
| benefit their competitors more than them?
|
| Because they'll make bank off of Hashicorp Cloud Platform.
|
| > Another option is to 'go native,' with each of the big three
| hyperscalers offering its dedicated options: Cloud Formation with
| AWS, Bicep with Azure, and Config Controller in Google Cloud.
|
| Not an option. People manage way, way more than just AWS, Azure
| and GCP with Terraform. GitHub, Cloudflare, Tailscale, etc ...
|
| It's an interesting time for Hashistack for sure, but I don't
| think the industry is prepared to move away from the tooling.
| serbrech wrote:
| Bicep has the potential to provide a cross platform solution, but
| it's unclear whether that's the direction:
| https://github.com/radius-project/bicep-types-aws
| szszrk wrote:
| I would not expect that to happen any time soon. Maybe they
| will see a chance to promote bicep more by such move. Yet until
| now they actively (and reasonably) advise in their docs
| Terraform use, if you consider multicloud and few other
| situations.
|
| I would rather expect MS to declare support for OpenTofu. They
| don't even have to be involved in it directly.
|
| The main work is ensuring azure providers compatibility (which
| is formally maintained by hashi). Add compatibility with Tofu
| to Azure Verified Modules [0] (a great project btw), and we
| have a clean way out of this by providing real help where it's
| most needed.
|
| [0] https://azure.github.io/Azure-Verified-Modules/
| nunez wrote:
| "Who will buy HashiCorp" was the question that everyone was
| asking for basically their entire existence.
|
| Vagrant, Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad were just too good.
| HashiCorp's biggest competitor against Terraform and Vault
| Enterprise was their own stuff! If your platform team was even
| moderately competent, you had no need for any of that stuff,
| especially at the prices they were asking for!
|
| Personally, I was hoping for Microsoft to acquire them.
|
| Terraform as a replacement for ARM is _literally_ the dream, and
| Vault would have been a really good underlying service for Azure
| Key Vault.
|
| Now that I think about it, I'd love a universe in which GitHub is
| Azure DevOps, TFE-but-better is Azure RM, and Vault is Azure Key
| Vault. Alas, that is not reality.
|
| I want to think that Microsoft made a bid but lost out to IBM.
|
| All that said, OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement for Terraform;
| nearly zero work required. I haven't tried OpenBao yet, but I
| presume that it's the same situation there. There's enough steam
| propelling them to make me think that they'll pull through for
| the long haul.
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