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Comment by ms4720 | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is that if hashicorp thinks you are a competitor you and your clients now have legal/operational issues. Ie you are now a competitor because we are releasing a product just like yours, here is a letter from a lawyer telling you to stop using terraform.

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> if hashicorp thinks you are a competitor

This is precisely the problem with the new BSL license. Whether your usage of Terraform complies with the license isn’t determined by the legal terms, but instead is entirely at the whim of HashiCorp. And they can change their mind at any time. It makes it impossible to build anything on top of Terraform.

I talk about that more here: https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-op...

This covers really well why I think the BSL license is a non-starter for things like TF. I get trying to prevent AWS from competing with you using your own open source code, but it creates this ambiguity where it's not clear whether lots of uses are or are not competing with HashiCorp.

> For example, if you’re an independent software vendor (ISV) or managed service provider (MSP) in the DevOps space, and you use Terraform with your customers (but not necessarily Terraform Cloud/Enterprise), are you a competitor? If your company creates a CI / CD product, is that competitive with Terraform Cloud or Waypoint? If your CI / CD product natively supports running Terraform as part of your CI / CD builds, is that embedding or hosting? If you built a wrapper for Terraform, is that a competitor? Is it embedding only if you include the source code or does using the Terraform CLI count as embedding? What if the CLI is installed by the customer? Is it hosting if the customer runs your product on their own servers?

The answer is at the whim of HashiCorp and subject to change at any point in the future. Even ignoring the attempt to dilute the meaning of "open source", the practical implications of the BSL license are more than enough reason to coalesce around a truly open source fork IMO.

I worked at a financial institution that heavily utilized terraform. Their business is banking and they do not offer automation, orchestration or IaC as a service. They're fine.

This seems to affect only those places that attempt to build a business off terraform.

I am not saying those businesses can't be mad at the rug getting pulled out from under them, but it's important to be accurate that this doesn't affect end users of TF directly.

Is the financial institution made up of separate legal entities which bill each other for services, and does one of those entities provide tech infra for the other legal entities?

Good point, but no. Also I think they pay Hashicorp for support.

The messiness of the real-world unfortunately doesn't play well with ambiguity in licences :)

It'll be a headache for every large company which now has to send the licence to their legal teams who have to ask these kind of questions (another interesting one is "can contractors touch our terraform setup?") - in fairness to Hashicorp they've tried to address some of these issues in their FAQ, but the FAQ isn't legally binding so legal teams have to go on what's actually written in the licence.

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