Outside of Vault, Terraform was their bread and butter. It’s understandable they would be scared of OpenTofu. Certain things that are novel have a tendency to leave the nest. This is one of those cases. They could go the Docker route, provide paid support and extra tooling around it, but decided to wage war against OSS instead.
I see it more as both sides taking calculated risk. Developers contributing to a corporate-led OSS project with particular licensing should know that they can be rug-pulled at any time. They benefit during the project and afterwards from a good fork that otherwise wouldn't exist (a healthy fork taking shape or not is additional risk). OpenTofu is a great win for the community.
For the company the risk is that the stronger community they build, the higher the chances of a serious backlash when they rug pull. Weigh the reputation damage, and upon emergence of a good fork having a serious competitor, to the benefits of community contributions.
Don't want to be rug pulled? Choose community-led projects with good governance and copyleft licensing to contribute to.
Where's this same vitriol directed at Amazon, Google, et al.?
They've built huge cloud platforms on the backs of open source. These are highly profitable machines that siphon up so much free labor and give very little back. Instead we attack HashiCorp, whose entire product is going to fall into disuse over a fork of the very thing they built. Why is that?
I'm angry at AWS - it's literally just open source software run at scale. None of the infra and software behind AWS is open, though, so Amazon gets to lord over all of it and soak up all of the benefits.
I see it hard to attack smaller companies when the giant is in the corner taxing all of us and making fat margins.
Small companies struggle. Big companies have all the advantages, and we're giving them a pass.
If Meta announced that every company hosting a React website needed to pay them a licensing fee starting next month or shut it down, they would (rightfully) get vitriol for it. That is what this is equivalent to, not big companies using open source projects. HashiCorp is free to use whatever open source they want, including in proprietary products (that's the entire point of open source). It's the rug pull and blindsiding of the community that is the problem.
HashiCorp is seeking a monopoly on hosting Terraform, which is bad for me as a user if I think another vendor might do a better job (or even just to keep prices in line with costs). It would have been better if they had been paid for writing Terraform and now hosting services could compete on their own merits.
> HashiCorp is seeking a monopoly on hosting Terraform
HashiCorp is trying to see an upside to the thing they've put a lot of effort into building. They're seeing lots of other companies -- including Amazon -- use it to enhance their own bottom lines off of HashiCorp's hard work.
These companies pose an existential threat to HashiCorp, and the HashiCorp stakeholders are getting nothing in return.
Free repackaging lowers the fitness of HashiCorp as an organization and cuts short HashiCorp's growth potential, resulting in lower revenue, less hiring, and more competition -- all of which ultimately inhibits HashiCorp's growth into a well-rounded company with a rich set of offerings. They're effectively being knee-capped and fenced in by low-margin competition.
While this is certainly true, there is also another part of the puzzle.
There are plenty contributors in the ecosystem building providers, submitting PRs under the assumption that the ecosystem will benefit and not solely Hashicorp.
As it stands most providers are not maintained by Hashicorp, e.g. AWS, Azure, Google, Hetzner, GitLab, ...
While the license change does not directly affect the providers it limits the ecosystems use of those providers.
HCP chose to open source Terraform. They didn't have to. They chose to market the OSS aspect of their products and use it as a selling point.
It may well be true that HCP is having trouble hitting their revenue goals because they open sourced Terraform but that doesn't mean the competition is the bad actor, for using an OSS product entirely in the spirit of OSS.
As it stands, my opinion is that your framing is incorrect. There is Terraform, which was OSS, and there is Terraform Cloud/Terraform Enterprise, which is not OSS. A lot of the development energy goes into TFC/TFE, and there is where the attractive, for pay, features are. Terraform has not been receiving a lot of development time. Only a few people from HCP, part time, working on it. I believe that the reality is that HCP is unable to keep up with their TFC/TFE product. They aren't innovating, and they are attempting to use the legal system to remove competition rather than compete on product. And now that OpenTofu exists and is part of LF, you don't even need HCP to succeed for your Terraform code to continue to live. Maybe one feels that is unfair, but it was their decision to OSS the product, and their decisions to change that. And capitalism isn't fair. Shrug emoji.
Big Tech throws free stuff people all the time and they usually being the one winning product / lib everybody is using. People just started to expect the same thing from all companies no matter the size and profitability. It's madness.
“In Rust” is a technical detail that influences various properties of the result (performance certainly; maintainability likely; immaturity possibly for areas like GUI). That’s quite different from “from Japan” which doesn’t say anything specific and measurable.
I cancelled nearly all my subscriptions and set up an old notebook at home with Jellyfin and qBittorent + search plugins. Pretty simple and satisfies my needs.
Every ORM basing post is like this. Some dude is dissatisfied with Hiberante/GORM/SQLAlchemy, declares ORMs as an "anti-pattern", then proceeds to reinvent the wheel.
I was a subscriber more than 10 years ago but gave up when they started to have pushy, navigation blocking ads. It was like being unable to turn page before some time passed on the ad. How hostile is that?! Very! Analogy: you see an ad in the street and you are not allowed to walk on for some period of time, forced to stay at the ad. I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.
I still buy the paper format occasionally, I love their articles - it is also easy jumping over ads in the physical format -, but I will not subscribe for paper version due to the amount of paper used and my trust in their electronic version is gone. I did not try their app since (and my tablet use sinked too, I might need much more push now to give a second try).
> I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.
I listen to the audio edition nowadays, that has no ads. Also, I haven't found any good alternatives to it. The weekly issues and the regional columns are a very convenient format for me to consume the news.
Whats even worse are the newsletters from news organizations imo. There's no ublock origin for Apple Mail content viewers. I either lose content like imagery or I have to go all in and load all their remote content, tracking pixels, the works. The ads will be for things like "pills the doctor doesn't want you to know about" and other phishy sounding stuff.
Yeah, for them, not for the community that they tried to fuck over.