[izalutski]

Indeed - but the Terraform community appears to be hit the hardest. Because unlike Consul, there's no open-source hostable anything. It feels just an arbitrary restriction for a language + CLI; the terms of the licence can be viewed as if whatever you ship has Terraform cli embedded, you're in breach. I can see the reason for SPL like Mongo did - it is indeed unfair for AWS to make money off hosted open-source mongodb. But this move by Hashi I'm struggling to wrap my head around

[bityard]

> it is indeed unfair for AWS to make money off hosted open-source mongodb

Why? If software authors don't understand that releasing their code under an open source license means someone else other than them may potentially benefit from it, that's really on them.

[_msw_]

Disclosure: I work for Amazon.

Amazon has never offered a database service based on the MongoDB server software. Not when it was AGPLv3 nor when it was SSPLv1.

[redwood]

But Amazon did copy the software and continues to sow confusion in the community about which is which

[_msw_]

No, it didn't copy the software. That's like saying min.io copied S3 software, which would also be false.

It implemented a wire protocol for interoperability purposes, similar to functionality in IBM DB2, Azure CosmosDB, FerretDB, and other databases.

[redwood]

Right and it continues to sow confusion in the community

[_msw_]

If there is anything specific you believe is confusing, please provide some details and I will pass the feedback on.

[hashtag-til]

Authors do understand the benefits of OSS development.

Predatory unethical open source freeloaders don’t.

[alephnerd]

Based on BSL, if you aren't trying to commercialize on top of Terraform you'd still be fine.

If you're using Terraform to manage deployments in test and development it's still business as usual, but if you're actively using them in production or making a company that sells a wrapper around Terraform then you'd have to pay Hashicorp.

Honestly it's pretty fair. I can continue to make my own personal, test, or development apps using vault, consul, and terraform.

And this move was done because plenty of large companies (not naming names because this is starting to touch a legal gray area) are using Vault and Consul in production to generate hundreds of millions to billions a year in revenue.

[sciurus]

As has been pointed out elsewhere in the comments, this is incorrect. The switch to BSL does not mean you have to start paying Hashicorp to use their formerly OSS products in production. To quote their FAQ:

> All non-production uses are permitted. All production uses are allowed other than hosting or embedding the software in an offering competitive with HashiCorp products or services.

[nijave]

Doesn't this eliminate any managed runners since they'd compete with Terraform Cloud?

[igorzij]

with Vault and Consul that makes a ton of sense; they're centralised backend services that are inherently SaaS-like. But expanding the "on top of terraform" definition to a CLI / language? That's insane. It's like making a programming language or framework proprietary and saying you can't sell anything written in the language without the language creator's permission. I guess such languages did exist in the early days of the industry but those days are long gone

[erik_seaberg]

> unfair for AWS to make money off hosted open-source

Competition is healthy. Everyone should be reluctant to lock himself in with a vendor seeking a monopoly.