galenmarchetti

Ooo I think I can do that. Would probably take a week or two to get the time to add, but looks pretty straightforward. great idea

Hey Paddy, sure thing! I'll share some thoughts here and see if I can add it to the repo, too, so that other people can see it.

The advantage is that you automatically get pre-loaded PyMongo or SQLAlchemy clients in your Jupyter environment, with connection URLs correctly configured to your database. You also get the same in the Streamlit app.

If you have a static dev database that you always use/maintain, and you're comfortable with your connectors, then you probably don't find a lot of value in that. But if you're like me and you always have to look up how to configure the network connections through the docker network + exposed ports, and you're never sure how to construct the connection URL and configure the default clients, then that stuff comes right out of the box.

I think these things are most useful for me in the "proof-of-concept" stage where I'm just starting a new data engineering idea from scratch and I want a brand new database.

Going along those lines - I'm going to add elasticsearch next, because I always want that search functionality over text but always feel like its hard to spin up and connect to

Wow - really cool you had the chance to see this in person. I didn't know that about dotCloud's positioning...especially given the relative differentiation compared to Heroku in those days.

Also, I didn't know about the lightning talks, both of those together make a ton of sense - thanks for sharing your personal perspective on this big moment in history

seconding the answer given by OP...I've also found the raw clients very low level and hard to use. I appreciate the higher level abstraction here, emphasis on "batteries included" and usability mirroring kubectl

I think this is the right way to think about it. Still a lot of value in making the various numbers bigger...if you don't do that, competitors will, and then you'll lose market share way faster than you did before.

But if Apple is looking for a step change in revenue or tech dominance, they'll have to rely more on other innovative/step-change product lines like the VR headset...I'm sure they're doing that, just not sure if investors are all seeing it that way

Yes - a ton of people. "No code" is great, tons of small businesses use them to put together internal tooling and reduce operational costs in a way that previously would only be possible with an engineering team.

This is great to know! I wasn't aware - I appreciate the attentive response here specifically tailored around Starlink's class of capabilities.

Feels like the elephant in the room here is...why can't the US military deploy Starlink capabilities themselves? Is this not meaningful defense technology to own themselves / worthy of legitimate defense research+spending? Feels like with the amount of taxes going into defense, USG and their allies shouldn't have to rely on Elon to make strategically sound decisions

"One X user responded by saying that their small business missed out on more than $2,000 worth of sales due to the outage, during what is the biggest month of the year for the company"

Ouch...that's sad.

And they say cause of outage not yet known...unknown, or not yet reported/shared with the public?

I wonder how much of the stability is the extreme reluctance to do any upgrades or touch anything related to that mainframe code. In my experience with larger institutions using mainframes, its largely "code freeze, do not mess with it".

I wonder if this is a consequence of the stability, or a cause of it? Modern tech stacks are always upgrading components underneath to remain modern and frequency of changes cause instability no matter how hard you try. Not really any meaningful tooling to get around that yet

I think, if Terraform was licensed under AGPL, then not only would all of those folks would have to also open-source their products, but also that would be the intent of the license in the first place

Love this framing of the license...as Stallman said, who does that server really serve? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

I imagine so...I wonder if its possible to draft an open-source license that commits future versions of the project to be drafted under the same license. Maybe AGPL does this (?) I know AGPL applies to all "modifications", I wonder if that applies to modifications done by the maintainers themselves in the future. If so, maybe we'll see AGPL-like provisions becoming more popular in order to help folks feel more confident

didn't think about the documentation but that's especially true...it's a massive amount of copy, between all the tutorials, how-tos, educational material, and example code, all mindfully presented in a useful way

definitely...and they get to keep that credibility and coverage. at least, as long as this move didn't totally alienate the folks that got on terraform back then

ah wow...I guess that begs the question, "will this just blow over". As far as I can tell Elasticsearch continues to do well and is more or less in the clear (could be wrong)

this is a great point...further down the comments, an OpenTF maintainer made a great point that all of these services are "backend hostable" services. Terraform doesn't even have a backend service component...Terraform Cloud does, but not Terraform itself.

I didn't contemplate this when writing the article but it seems like this might be a pretty big factor in the reaction to the change. At least to my memory, I don't remember as strong as a pushback from any of these companies changing their licenses

would love to know a definitive/quantitative answer for #2, for sure. I do think it makes a difference when it comes to the "backstabbing" implications of the change

wow, didn't know about this. very cool + would be interesting to see this in more places. Just checked it out. for those lazy:

"If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee's affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights."

this is a great point. I've been following your work decently closely but this is the first time I thought about the "hostable" vs "non-hostable" differentiation. And thinking more deeply on it, of course it matters. There's a pretty big distinction and, naively, perhaps their attempt to protect TF Cloud with this doesn't even accomplish what they intended for it to accomplish. If the backend part is the thing...that was never even in contention, anyway. If this is the case, they only managed to hurt the community.

True...it's just difficult to draft a license that says something along the lines of "If you're Big Tech, we have the right to go after you, if you're small startup, you're safe".

I think there's a swath of Terraform users (likely minority) who find themselves in a legal gray area, or a legal black-and-white area, where they're directly at risk. Even if Hashicorp never intended to target small startups with this, the wording of the license unfortunately applies and is enough to make anyone nervous.

I think MongoDB had a similar issue when they went source-available, they seemed to intend to only protect themselves from big tech but unfortunately a lot of smaller players got spooked. I think (?) it's fine now though

haha...fair point!

One thing that I've been curious to see, and not sure if anyone has done it yet, is a quantification of contribution to Terraform, comparing amount of work done from external contributors to the work done by Hashicorp-internal contributors.

I know it's hard to make the comparison of what is "harder" work or "more" work in a software project from looking at commits alone, but would be interesting to see nonetheless.

100% agreed with you...would be safest for everyone to take this stance going forward. I do think, and I could be wrong, that not everyone realized that the licensing worked this way. Or had their guard up when contributing. I think that's the issue...perhaps their fault, perhaps not, but I see the issue.

I wonder if this will be an example moving forward that people keep in mind when contributing to any OSS project

I think this whole process has been beautiful. Hashicorp was well aware that licenses are tagged to versions of projects rather than the "project" itself, and used that to its advantage as a business to start maximizing profits to its enterprise offerings.

The community was well aware that once you tag a license to a version, you can't undo that. And they're well aware that they can fork from that license forwards and build their own "new" project, version by version, that stays open source.

This is going to be fascinating to see play out, and I think a case study in software licensing going forwards...can't wait to see how OpenTF does down the road.

I get what you're saying, but on a strictly legal standpoint, everything Hashicorp is doing is by the books...all previous versions of Terraform will remain under the old license and everyone can still use Terraform without fearing a future lawsuit, as long as they stick to those version. So no one made any legal missteps here, neither the users nor Hashicorp.

I think its the ethical side, rather than the legal side, thats more complicated...the contributions from the community contributed to the Terraform "brand" that got bigger and bigger, and now Terraform is attempting to secure their monopoly on capitalization of the brand when previously there was an implicit understanding that the "brand" was open-source.

However, you might also argue that there was an implicit understanding on Hashicorps side that the community wouldn't build directly competitive projects when they held the lions share of the funding on the contribution/maintenance side...

I think the whole thing is pretty complicated - is Hashicorp leeching off of the contributors or are the competitive contributors leeching off of Hashicorp? Honestly I see both sides.

The beautiful thing is that its totally legal and acceptable for OpenTF to do their own thing and continue Terraform under their own terms...so either way we get to see this play out :)

Creativity follows a different pattern than highly repeatable line work. Software engineering is an inherently creative pursuit, especially when paired closely with a dynamic product function.

Definitely recommend Rick Rubin's book The Creative Act for a detailed glance into how wildly off the attempt to systematize and measure productivity is, in a creative context. https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/0593652886

I always wondered what would have happened to Bird/Lime if COVID hadn't hit. I love those things

Crazy to think when they started, their product was a chipboard. You had to put the video monitor on yourself.

What has gotten them huge, and sustained them throughout the years, was a series of products that really look nothing like their first. Or their second. Just a continual evolution against a vision, which I think has been pretty consistent.

Worth putting modern, small startups today in that context...you never know what they'll evolve to become beyond their first, second, even third products

this is absolutely incredible. if you go to Ling Ling on Reforma, you'll get a view from the 56th story of Chapultepec Uno and you can still see how the main roads correspond to the causeways in these reproductions. you can almost see how the modern city was overlaid on the ancient one

If you're interested in consensus algorithms, you might be interested in this book that I used in a theoretical course on distributed system called "Reasoning about Knowledge" (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262562003/reasoning-about-knowl...).

You have to invest a bit in learning about modal logic, but once you do get past that part, this book provides proofs of why things like Raft or Paxos work that are super intuitive and straightforward. Basically pushing the complexity of proving these algorithms into the logic structure used to form the proof (in an intuitive way). Highly recommend, changed how I think about consensus!