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Comment by martypitt | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP, but I suspect HN has trimmed the anchor link.

> https://github.com/opentffoundation/roadmap/issues/24#issuec...

That's the comment that made the issue clear -- specifically TOS were amended for https://registry.terraform.io to state:

> You may download providers, modules, policy libraries and/or other Services or Content from this website __solely for use with, or in support of, HashiCorp Terraform.__

ie., it looks like the intent is "You can't use OpenTF with registry.terraform.io".

IMO, that feels a little petty. But, I guess if OpenTF is taking a position of "Use us instead of Terraform", then they shouldn't expect to get the usage of Hashicorps infra.

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> But, I guess if OpenTF is taking a position of "Use us instead of Terraform", then they shouldn't expect to get the usage of Hashicorps infra.

It’s totally something they can do, but it seems short-sighted. They had to know that this wouldn’t actually stop the momentum around OpenTF, but just result in HashiCorp giving up the control they have over the canonical namespace.

As precedent, Docker allows Kubernetes and Podman to access its registry, for example.

If you look at it from a proprietary software company (which is what Hashicorp is now), it's totally expected and understandable. Why should they spend money supporting extra load on their infrastructure from people that are not directly paying for that? It makes perfect sense.

Is it short-sighed? If you think they will go down in market share from now on, yes. But Hashicorp probably thinks it won't or it wouldn't have made the change in the first place. For them, it's all the way up from here.

> Why should they spend money supporting extra load on their infrastructure from people that are not directly paying for that?

There same logic applies to users; at this point, I have to assume that the only reason that Hashicorp is providing anything to people who aren't actively giving them money is to try and get money from them later. This is also one of the reasons I'm abandoning them ASAP; now that the money squeeze has started, it's not like they're going to stop.

Not to mention the number of community contributions is going to plummet.

At some point third party and independent module and provider developers will need to decide whether to cross-support both tools.

I don’t think Hashi is going to go out of their way to make life easy for Terrafork. Cross-compatibility won’t last long.

From my point of view, controlling the canonical namespace is a form of soft power in the ecosystem. Since as the post says, the actual files are hosted on GitHub, the cost of the extra load on their infrastructure is real but probably not material to a company of their size -- as I understand it, it's more like running a DNS service than a file host.

So it _seems_ (the word I used above as well) from my perspective that they’re giving up a bunch of soft power for little gain, but it's very possible that I'm either wrong about the value of the soft power, or wrong about the cost of running the infra.

I published a terraform provider when the registry in beta while working at a startup. They do some “value ads” like code signing and such, but you’re right - it can functionally be replaced by the GitHub release page.

> As precedent, Docker allows Kubernetes and Podman to access its registry, for example.

Don’t give them any ideas. Nothing would stop them, though it is probably hard to actually enforce on a public repo.

I haven't tried every single one, but the AWS public ECR has a bunch of the "library" images from Docker Hub (e.g. public.ecr.aws/docker/library/golang:1.21 ) and as the "public" part implies, no creds required to access it

They do have a search interface, if one wanted to look for their favorite: https://gallery.ecr.aws/

We switched many images to use the ecr.aws registry because we were getting rate-limited on dockerhub. Our k8s cluster was on EKS and it worked out very well.

you probably need mirroring anyway. Lots of stuff missing on public ecr. I haven't verified if those on public ecr are legit or not or at least, same as the dockerhub counterpart.

Well, in practice DockerHub isn't usable for many Kubernetes places anymore due to rate limiting.

Anybody should be, as is sensible in any case, mirroring in a local registry as minimum. Probably it's even better to investing capabilities to be able to build all the images you rely on for being able to apply security patches etc

This is the same situation as with Microsoft, Visual Studio Code, and OpenVSX. It's covered in depth here: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

Very petty. I’ve been a longtime advocate and evangelist for Hashicorp products, but jeez.

I felt they were ‘one of the good ones’ making great tech just to make great tech. Success and profit followed making great tech.

How the mighty have fallen. Long live Terrafork I guess. Hashifork all their other stuff too I suppose. Very disappointing.

Is this even enforceable given the ruling about scraping? I don't have any rights to dictate what browser you use to accsss my website.

How would they even know when the protocol is identical? I mean this is hardly the least unethical thing a company would do.

Ok, I've put the anchor back up there.

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