[echelon]

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.

Ugh. I don't get this.

[paxys]

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.

[erik_seaberg]

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.

[echelon]

> 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.

Meanwhile you're eating for free.

[trevex]

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.

[sausagefeet]

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.

[mathverse]

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.

[unethical_ban]

Right, I wonder how many people are insulting Hashicorp while deploying to AWS.