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Comment by achristmascarl | Hacker News Reader

terraform changed to business source license pretty recently too: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...

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When they did this the community forked it into https://opentofu.org/

In what sense did they side with OpenTofu? Genuinely curious.

I think you meant to reply to this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149230

Considering IBM sided with the fork, I suspect it'll be reverted for most or all of Hashicorp's projects.

I bet they'll organize it under Red Hat, and Red Hat will apply their open source policy to it, and that will involve reverting to OSI approved licenses

That doesn’t seem like what’s happening from first appearances. Looks like it’ll remain separate for now which means no RH influence to fix the licensing boondoggle.

Red Hat is a shell of itself. There is no appetite for taking on Terraform when Ansible is their ugly baby.

I've found they are complements to each other. One provisions infra, the other customized that infra for your needs.

But I could be totally off-base.

Yes. I did this a while back: https://github.com/radekg/terraform-provisioner-ansible. That received some contributions from IBM. Unfortunately, HC never wanted to maintain it, then in 0.15 they replaced provisioners with providers or plugins (can’t remember anymore). I had a couple of discussions with their OSS head for TF at the time but the bottom line from them was „why don’t you rewrite it in your spare time”. The problem was their replacement didn’t give access to the underlying communicator (your SSH or winrm). So I hung the towel.

You’re right, I was off base with my comment. They are indeed complementary.

I mean, they bought Red Hat, and killed CentOS; I can say after 25 years in enterprise IT, I have zero trust in IBM to keep any open source licensing "open".

IBM didn't kill CentOS.

They where under IBM ownership at the time, so IBM did kill it. The software now branded as CentOS is basically Fedora, which is fine for desktops, but never felt good on servers. CentOS was perfect for a lot of us SysAdmins back in the day to use on our own servers etc, while using Red Hat at work. We also used it for anything PoC or servers that did not require support. These days licensing is easier using models like AWS Subscriptions, but we used to buy licenses in bulk, and if there where not enough licenses, we had to do the whole procurement dance.

Side note, in the 12 years that I used Red Hat at work, we used the support 2 times, and both times they forwarded some articles that we had already found and implemented. However, enterprise always demands some support contract behind critical systems to blame in case of disaster.

Honestly, who knows what would have happened if Red Hat was left as an independent entity, but we do know for sure that they did make the changes after the acquisition.

I work at Red Hat. IBM was not involved in the decision to kill CentOS.

>The software now branded as CentOS is basically Fedora

CentOS Stream (what replaced CentOS) is vastly more similar to CentOS than Fedora.

It's CentOS with rolling patches instead of bundling those same patches into minor releases every 6 months. Only the release model is different from RHEL / CentOS, otherwise it's built the same and holds to the same policies in terms of testing, how updates are handled and compatibility.

Fedora on the other hand is very, very different. Packages are built with different flags, different defaults (e.g. filesystems), very different package versions, a different package update policy (even within one major release Fedora is much more aggressive than CentOS Stream / RHEL / CentOS), etc.

I understand that not having an near-exact replica of RHEL supported for 10 years was very convenient and the way the EOL was announced, and the timelines, sucked massively. But CentOS Stream is suitable for a large number of the use cases where CentOS was used previously, it is not "basically Fedora". It's more like 98% RHEL-like wheras Fedora is doing something else entirely.

I also should have mentioned that the CentOS Stream lifecycle is 5 years whereas Fedora's is 13 months

5 years is less than 10, but it's a lot less different than 10 vs 1

That is the kind of thing that could have been a kind of negotiation tactic for purchasing Hashicorp, not necessarily done in good faith.

Hashicorp's relicensing could also have been a tactic to get the sale to happen.

IBM didn't just fork Vault to make a statement -- IBM Cloud Secrets Manager was (openly) built directly on Vault OSS.

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