Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Spivak 1042 days ago
I don't get this one, you pick OpenTerraform and get on with your life. It's the same with picking OpenSearch over Elastic. I can use the proprietary version that locks me into a single profit-seeking vendor and doesn't have community backing or the one run by a foundation made up of companies that use and are heavily invested in Terraform.
1 comments

How dare a vendor come up with an idea, pay people to execute on that idea, and the gasp try to make money from it? Outrageous!
How dare a vendor come up with an idea, pay people to execute on it, give it away for free to the world, acquire users and soak in all the community contributions from people who thought they were using and contributing to a public good, try and fail to indirectly monetize a hosted version because other people were better at it than them, then rug-pull out from under everyone and use copyright/government-stick to kill their competition because they can't compete on even terms.

Then a group of people who are users of idea and actually making money off it with value-adds step up to maintain it as a community project ensuring that it stays open for everyone -- yeah those guys are the assholes. Terraform would have went nowhere if it wasn't OSS and Terraform would be nothing without its outside contributions that make up far more than the code of Terraform core itself. There's a trail of bodies to prove it.

And you should love this, projects that are stewarded by its own users are incentivized to make it the best it can be instead of rejecting contributions because it competes with their cloud offering [1]

[1] https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/9556