OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

Hashicorp switched Terraform from MPL to BSL yesterday. Many other companies did that in the past to prevent others taking their code and charging for running it as a managed service (eg Mongo, Elastic). With Hashi however, the server-side part was never open-source to start with. There was no such thing as "open-source Terraform Server". And now it seems that any commercial product that uses the Terraform language under the hood is at risk of violating the terms of the license. Funny enough, our own product (Digger, an open-source CI runner for Terraform) is not using Terraform (or any other Hashicorp's code) under the hood. So this change probably hits other TACOS (Spacelift, Env0) much harder than us. But with the recent pricing changes and now the license there is no guarantee that Hashicorp won't make another move in the future that would one way or another hurt us. So if there was an MPL fork, we'd rather swith to that, just to stay on the safe side. And since there isn't one yet, we thought why not make one?

In this I&#x27;m mostly concerned by the extremely vague description of what is it you can&#x27;t do with this new terraform commercially. You can&#x27;t &quot;compete&quot; with hashicorp. Well, if I&#x27;m doing devops consulting and I write terraform for clients is it competing with hashicorp? If not, what if they start offering such service tomorrow? Will it be competition them?<p>Personally, speaking figuratively, I think they just pulled a shotgun and decided to shoot both of their feet off. As someone doing devops consultancy since well before terraform became a thing I&#x27;d have no problem at all going back to custom python code with configuration in yaml if the clients decide its better for them.

I know most HN commentators are thinking about Terraform, but I think this change was done with Consul and Vault in mind.<p>Plenty of companies (including my employer) have been building fully monetized software using Consul and Vault under the hood and not paying them a dime. We&#x27;re a company that&#x27;s valued&#x2F;market capped in the Billions btw and I know plenty of other large software companies doing the same thing.

I encourage this project to switch to AGPL license. Also, if you&#x27;re a maintainer of a dependency of terraform and other projects, please consider doing the same. There&#x27;s no way terraform can afford to support all those dependencies themselves.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hashicorp.com&#x2F;trademark-policy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hashicorp.com&#x2F;trademark-policy</a> - surely this is a violation?

Shares were going down for some time, env0 (Terraform Cloud competitor) just raised 35m from VC for a what seems to be a good product... Hashicorp did it&#x27;s move. If there&#x27;s a community behind, the fork will live and, who knows, maybe many will start using it instead of the original one. It&#x27;s all up to the community and substantial sponsors, at this point.<p>I still think that the best way to compete is by having a more appealing product, thought, rather than changing licence. And I mean this for Hashicorp, Elastic, etc.<p>If you need to do this move is because you don&#x27;t really succeed at having a better product, else you would just benefit from FOSS rather than it being a liability.

They need to have a license structure like ARM. With ARM you can license their IP cores or you can license their architecture. Apple and NVidia and even Qualcomm have different needs (higher performance, higher process node, better battery life, and higher cost is okay for them) and they take an Architecture License (Qualcomm occasionally licenses IP cores, too.)<p>Spacelift and Env0 need architecture licenses. People on TF cloud essentially are licensing their IP cores. Their terraform cloud service is being run very poorly. When outsiders moved to provide an alternative for this thing which is broken inside of Hashicorp, the lawyers have been sic&#x27;d on them! That is not adult behavior. It shows a great naivety in business affairs ...

How does this new license work in terms of either a bug is found in terraform post support date or a new feature is added to the Hashicorp version.<p>Can the patch &#x2F; new code be copied to this version without violating anything or does it have to be some sort of “clean room” patch where you only read the bug report and not the actual fix

I wonder if a non commercial Terraform Cloud &quot;offering&quot; like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;leg100&#x2F;otf">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;leg100&#x2F;otf</a> is &quot;competing&quot; with Hashicorp...

Hopefully they can finally add the ability to initiate providers ad-hoc, such that you can create environments and then configure those afterwards in one go.

Well, can next Terraform successor be build by few vendors and community, not just a single one?<p>Not a single vendor should own it all or even the majority.

I wonder if the license change also applies to HCL? Which I&#x27;m seeing more and more use of in open source projects unrelated to IaC.

I&#x27;m curious if Pulumi is interested in this.

This is awesome! The CentOS of Terraform, finally.<p>I&#x27;ll probably use this for my personal projects instead of Hashi&#x27;s official stuff.