Terraform, Vault, Nomad etc by HashiCorp moving away from Open Source

thenewstack.io HashiCorp Abandons Open Source for Business Source License

Like many other companies, HashiCorp has dropped the open source approach that gave its products their start for the source-available Business Source License (BSL).

HashiCorp is moving its products previously licensed as Open Source away from it to Business Source License (BSL) moving forward
Terraform is a popular Infrastructure as Code tool used for provisioning cloud resources like AWS, Azure among others
Terraform version 1.5.5 and earlier are still open source
there is a push for a community maintained open source fork if this decision is not reversed, OpenTF

Gruntwork response on the problem with BSL

https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-open-ab0b9ba65bca?gi=be31818bcbaf
Gruntwork is a creator of the tool Terragrunt which is an open source wrapper around Terraform to provide some additional tools for it

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28 comments

We will see how this plays out... Terraform is awesome but the product would not be very popular today if open source developers hadn't worked for 10 years for free to maintain and update it.
Now they take all their work and decides it's not open source anymore, because hashicorp needs to make money.
- I for one am recommending pulumi for any of my teams new infrastructure needs.
  
  I used pulumi but it's much worse than terraform. I didn't used to think so before I learned terraform however.
  My main reason to dislike pulumi is that you have to work around it's async behavior in python. Maybe it's better and more natural if you use typescript, but I had to constantly wrap methods in Outputs and other things to get the code to work.
  I had to adapt my code to how pulumi worked all the time. With terraform, I just write it and it works.
  
  So I'm using it with Python. For me it's able to do some stuff that terrafom never would be able to (Ive got a spot where resources are generated for each file/object on disk).
  
  Give me an example... What file on disk are you generating a pulumi resource from?
  
  We've got it rigged up for aws sso. Each department can make any number of permissions sets (and link to any number of groups). The config for that is all stored in git (with code owners configured so you can only mess up your own stuff).
- I wonder how many of those "open source developers", are actually employees of the same companies HashiCorp is accusing now of competing against them. No company is going to pay their employees to contribute to a piece of software, that they then have to buy a license for... so this can very well mean that HashiCorp is cutting off contributions from the same people most capable of contributing in the first place.
- No, just new versions.
  
  Not so "just". Terraform open source version went into a fork. Who will work on that one and who will continue with the hashicorp version? It's a split in the community now, and I bet most devs will continue on the hashicorp version.
  
  I bet most devs will continue on the hashicorp version
  Only the hobbyist ones. Every dev paid for by a company using the products, will be on the OpenSource fork.
  It's something companies often forget: open source, and the GPL in particular, is a way for companies to cooperate. Use the AGPL if you want to prevent unfair server-side competition. Switching to the BSL is restricting cooperation to only those with less experience.
  PS: IANAL, but by reading MariaDB's guidelines for the BSL, HashiCorp may not even have applied it correctly.

28 comments