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Comment by gobins | Hacker News Reader

> Notably, the three largest companies that most-directly compete with HashiCorp’s managed Terraform offerings, Spacelift, Env0, and Scalr, all have made multi-million dollar pledges to support a fork of Terraform (13 FTEs for five years between these three companies).

Wow all these three companies have products offering automation using Terraform. Obviously they would be against the license change.

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Terraform is only popular because it was open source. It wouldn’t have been 1/10th as widespread if it had started proprietary.

Because it was libre, or because it was (is) gratis?

I know that I downloaded and learned Terraform because it was free of charge only. I honestly didn't care and I didn't know about its specific licensing status. I was able to quickly and easily install, configure, and run it because Hashicorp made it available as a free-of-charge download. Period, full stop.

Compare it to VirtualBox, which is clearly not F/OSS, but gratis to download and use. In fact my employer mandates our use of VBox, so we all download it, irrespective of license terms. It's extremely popular, even outstripping qemu and other libre VMM implementations.

We started using it because it was open source, as is almost everything else noteworthy in that space.

Plenty of orgs will give you gratis products until you hit a certain usage level, and then they fly out a salesperson to get you onto an enterprise contract. We had zero interest in those shenanigans.

> Compare it to VirtualBox, which is clearly not F/OSS, but to download and use.

VirtualBox is GPLv2 licensed, so it is F/OSS.

Correct, only some extra and optional parts like the extension pack are closed-source and require a paid license for business use.

>Compare it to VirtualBox, which is clearly not F/OSS,

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads says

"The binaries are released under the terms of the GPL version 3" and the sources are here - https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk

(up to V6.1, it was licensed under GPL v2 - https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/GPL )

And VirtualBox is available in Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox notes that "A proprietary extra package enhances the base experience, adding things like RDP access to the Guest. "

Oops! I stand corrected on this. Thank you.

Side comment: that’s a gracious response. I appreciate that.

Libre. Because it ensures that if the company behind it goes bad, you (or somebody else!) can fork it so it doesn't threaten your business.

Gratis but proprietary means that the vendor retains full control, which they have an incentive to (ab)use, making it a riskier bet for a company.

Many end-users just really don't care. Most end-users haven't the knowledge, skills, or resources to accomplish and maintain a fork. That's an idealistic fantasy of a small percentage of elite devs and corps.

Decision makers are companies are often (though arguably not often enough) in that small percentage. Terraform is not a typical consumer product.

> In fact my employer mandates our use of VBox, so we all download it, irrespective of license terms.

I do hope you're not using the non-FOSS extension pack for a business while ignoring its license, or you're going to have a "fun" conversation with Oracle's sales/legal department...

Thanks for your concern. No, the extension pack does not contain any features we use, at all, but of course, this is on an individual, unmonitored, BYOD basis, so whatever the employees do is on them, I guess. We haven't been warned either which way about this.

It's the guest additions ISO thingy that's not open source.

> It's the guest additions ISO thingy that's not open source.

No, it's the extension pack that is closed source and under a non-GPL license. The guest additions ISO is commonly confused with the extension pack, but they have completely different spheres of influence and functionality. Guest additions is GPLv2, just as the main app is.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

Thanks for the correction.

And that’s great for the developer ecosystem. HashiCorp wants to lock you in to Terraform Cloud and start jacking up the price because they EULAed away competition.

You don’t have to use terraform cloud to use terraform.

No, but they want to use the new license to stop competitors from making better alternatives to Terraform Cloud.

If you don’t want to build your own Terraform CI solution you’ll be forced to buy it from HashiCorp.

Too late to edit my first reply to you, but I wanted to add that this situation would be like if Facebook said you can’t use React to make a social media website.

React wouldn’t have the adoption it would today if Meta were to have done something so untrustworthy. So many organizations would have avoided it entirely because they would have seen that as untrustworthiness and a business risk.

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