HashiCorp got the wrong message from the Terraform fork by OpenTF 🤦 and is doubling down on being an ass.
They changed their ToS to state:
"You may download providers, modules, policy libraries and/or other Services or Content from this website solely for use with, or in support of, HashiCorp Terraform. "
The #BSL should be called the Business Selfish License. In the end, by not permitting anyone else to benefit from their code, yes, gasp, including potential competitors, they effectively discourage outside contribution to their own code base, only to have it wither and die as they will loose control of their own market to forks like #OpenTF . In effect, #Hashicorp itself has caused what it seems to have feared most. Self inflicted #fail .
I can definitely see #SystemInitiative becoming a serious alternative to #Terraform. It's been fun to watch this very promising #opensource project take shape over discord. Things are moving along very fast!
While #Hashicorp decided to bank on being proprietary, #SystemInit decided to go all in on commercial #opensource, encouraging not only contributions, but competition.
I signed up for #systeminit, the new open open source #Terraform alternative. Looking forward to working through the tutorials. That legalise is quite the first impression, and I'm not yet sure how I mean that, but it looks promising! #DevOps#opensource
If you're not loving what #Hashicorp did, between #SystemInitiative, #OpenTF, and #Ansible AWX you now have a way to channel that energy for good and for the benefit of everyone. When it comes to #opensource, the community generally wins in the end. Now is a great time to get involved!
HashiCorp's recent change to BSL licensing for Terraform[1] and the rest of their product suite is not as big as the RHEL debacle but certainly seems to be generating similar waves. Now there's the OpenTF Manifesto [2] that's arguing for a fork of Terraform if HashiCorp doesn't relent.
I get that HashiCorp needs to make money, but it does seem a bit misjudged to do it this way.
@deverton I'm impacted by both and honestly, the #Hashicorp one is worse. I'm definitely not defending what #RedHat did with RHEL, but they didn't go proprietary and downstream distributions have all found ways to carry on, in no small part because of that open source licensing. Consider that Red Hat's correlary to Terraform, Ansible, remains open source, including AWX. What Hashicorp did was categorically worse.
A whole bunch of companies have proposed forking the last MPL release of Terraform and creating a foundation to maintain the fork similar to the Linux Foundation and CNCF if HashiCorp does not abandon its adoption of BSL.
I'm not convinced Hashicorp have been the best custodian of terraform, most obviously where efforts conflicted with their purported business model.
So I'd be happy seeing it moved under an independent foundation, whether Hashicorp are involved or not - it'll be a bumpy ride but it would be worth it.
Based on the Not-Allowed license list for @fedora the Business Source License (BUSL-1.1) is strictly forbidden. As COPR requires compliance with Fedora guidelines, there's not much I can do here.