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Comment by saxonww | Hacker News Reader

Also, I haven't read a lot about this, but I would be very surprised if the Spacelifts of the world could not work out a licensing arrangement.

The actual license at https://www.hashicorp.com/bsl says "provided such use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis which is competitive with HashiCorp's products." To me this sounds like a self-hosted version of something could still work with terraform, and you just have to provide the binary yourself vs. it being pre-packaged. IANAL; it would be pretty shitty if they started going after products that support terraform as a tool that way.

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Gruntwork co-founder/OpenTF core member here. Hashi went out of their way to clarify that you couldn't do this. https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#what-does-embedded-mea...

Well that does suck. I would also wonder if that's a legal battle they would win.

I've never used Spacelift, etc. so I may be off base with the comparison. But I think about them like specialized CD tools that do nice things with/for terraform. Their value is that you don't have to implement these nice integrations yourself in e.g. Jenkins.

So replace Spacelift with Jenkins. There are some community plugins that idk, facilitate reporting plan impact from code changes. Is Cloudbees now in violation of Hashicorp's license?

Regardless, good luck.

It would kind of make sense though? When part of the product you are selling is made and supported by someone else, don't they deserve a part of your income?

I know that FOSS works differently, but that's also the reason why a lot of open source software is of questionable quality. When the development becomes a burden (is not fun anymore) and nobody is compensated, why would someone waste their time on it? Good will only goes that far.

Not suggesting that proprietary software is without faults, but maybe such licenses are a good comprise?

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