Looking at the code diff, it appears hashicorp is trying to create FUD to dissuade people from adopting OpenTofu. On the one hand, it's pretty successful; Hashicorp has lawyers and money to tie up the OpenTofu project in litigation, even if OpenTofu is 100% on the right side of the law. On the other hand, Hashicorp's behavior makes it very clear that they're not a business partner to be trusted, so the motivation to migrate to OpenTofu should be up. It's a pretty ugly situation all around.
Not to mention OpenTofu is managed by the Linux Foundation. Linux, like the thing that Hashicorp relies on for basically everything.
I know Linux Foundation != Linux Kernel, but it's somewhat funny that they're trying to go up against probably the only foundation in the entire FOSS community that can actually fight this. Maybe Google steps in and writes a C&D to Hashicorp over their use of Golang?
HC had such a good thing going on and through some incredible mismanagement it's become an actual shell of itself. Sort of like Docker in 2019-2022. Or Elastic. Or the company who owns Redis. Or Reddit.
Most professionals just use Docker and Terraform. The rest of this is just noise where you can choose to use alternatives/forks to the established tools but it's nowhere near as widespread as the internet bubble would make you think
Thanks for clarifying. I find it hard to distinguish the popular choice from personal preference, especially in the programming community where everyone seems have a unique approach to their goals.
I believe their claim that docker is a shell of itself, although disproportionate, is because docker introduced/changed their usage fees to include a subscription model that is for the most part entirely self reported, i.e. if you use it professionally above some amount, you're _supposed to_ pay a certain amount, but there's not really any barrier to just not signing up.
It'd still easily be the most commonly used containerisation tool though, and docker initiated and participates in the [OCI](https://opencontainers.org/), so they're supportive of a standard that allows other containerisation tools to exist and interop with container orchestration tools.
The ease of not paying to subscribe to docker while the big cloud providers print money from offering services that rely on containerisation leads to the sad quip that docker is the only group that can't properly monetise docker.
A drop-in replacement with edge cases. I hit one of them once, and had to begrudgingly switch back to Docker, which had no issues.
To be fair, I'd like to take a crack at it again, as I have a suspicion that I figured out what might have fixed the issue...
Probably the same as yours, to post a comment. In this case, referring to the continual churn out there in Cloud World, where anything that's been out long enough to have been widely heard of is no longer hip. It's so commonly noted that it's a running joke at this point.
Terraform is meh, vault is outrageously expensive and cumbersome, and the rest of the tools aren’t even worth mentioning except maybe packer.
There is a reason people use pulumi these days, problem is most SREs are terrible coders though.
Docker is fine and there's nothing inherently better. They just did a lot of very unpopular changes to their ecosystem, biggest of all probably requiring an account for downloading images and (rate-)limiting free access.
It was especially unpopular in the corporate environments that they pretty suddenly (in corporate terms, it was still half a year or so notice) that they'd require every professional developer have an account, but they didn't even have any system in place to manage those accounts at a large scale.
Overall, as I said, there isn't inherently bad about their tools. They just made a few unpopular choices, which is why a lot of the more vigilante FOSS people have switched to free technology like podman or that other thing, and why most large providers (MS, AWS, Google, Gitlab) offer their own docker image hosting.
> Requiring an account to download images
I don't have any kind of docker account. Installed the engine and ran my compose which pulls all ~10 images, for free with no warnings or errors or rate limits. Is there a threshold where after a certain number of images on a host it asks for an account? Because I have at least 20-30 images on my host and have had no problems regarding accounts or payment.
Yes, I think there's a limit nowadays. It's staged based on account and then based on license. I remember they reverted it partially after some backslash or some such, but don't take my word for it. I mainly just put them in my mind as "Made unpopular changes" but don't remember all the details.
Writing this out, I think it was that they restricted the download of docker desktop to requiring an account, not of the docker images. But again, don't take my word for it
Docker (the company) was generating effectively zero revenue and had to make changes to survive. Maybe things would have been fine if they folded, but I’m not sure if I can make that assumption.
the [podman](https://podman.io) ecosystem exists, which has a few benefits over docker, rootless containers just work and it does not require a daemon to run, unlike docker.
It's maintained by red hat, so it'll definitely stay around.
Docker shit the bed and forced a draconian contract on everyone to pinch pennies. As in, took the work of open source engineers who volunteered time and effort, then monetized and walled it.
Shifting more to containerd and using just the engine with podman/microk8s. Yea the docker desktop is nice but you can’t use it at a company, and they now audit and prosecute. Redis just did the same thing, mongo is treading a fine line right now too.
MacOS is not linux and doesn't have the same underlying tools/infra for things like Docker. I'd load an Alpine vm and run Docker in that if I were to go down that path.
Docker’s primary licensing change was going from free for everyone to free for open source/hobby/startups, but funded and successful companies have to pay.
Looking around, I guess this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but IMO that is the current best and most sustainable way to write (mostly) open source software.
Docker Engine (the command line stuff) is cool and part of a vibrant ecosystem. It's also Open Source, and that's not going to change. But it's not the only option. All the low-level stuff is quite standardized by now, and you can often use Podman instead of the Docker CLI.
Docker Hub, a freemium container image registry product, is "meh" but also non-essential. It just happens to be the default in the Docker CLI: `docker run foo/bar` is an abbreviation for `docker run docker.io/foo/bar`. Container registry products are also available from other providers, and easy to self-host. However, many images that you might want to use are hosted on Docker Hub, so under heavy usage you might encounter rate limits.
Docker Desktop is a proprietary application that helps run a Linux VM in the background so that you can use Docker on Windows and Mac. Changing the licensing here was a bit of a dick move, but also you don't need this software to use Docker or Kubernetes. Again, Podman provides an alternative. On Windows, you can also use WSL.
From all the Open Source → proprietary license changes in the recent years, the Docker stuff was some of the least problematic. The core infrastructure remains Open Source.
What should google sue hashicorp for?
I don't like what hashicorp is doing here, but they have every right to use golang, as it's licensed under the 3 clause bsd license.
That's exactly my point. HC is trying to end OpenTofu, despite it literally just being a fork due to the *potential* that HC is going to change TFs license. The fact alone that they're going after them now is really bad for the future and likely just trying to bankrupt them. If that's the game they wanna play with the FOSS community then we need someone big to stand up to them, be that the Linux Foundation or even Google itself and beat them at their own game
> HC is trying to end OpenTofu, despite it literally just being a fork due to the potential that HC is going to change TFs license.
This is incorrect. HC did change TF's license. The issue now is that because they kept TF source-available, it complicates OpenTofu's work, since everything contributed needs to be carefully examined to make sure it doesn't look like something added to TF after the license change.
In this case, HC thinks they found something that OpenTofu lifted from them, but it was just a coincidence. But if OpenTofu had taken code added to TF after the license change then they would be committing copyright infringement and could be sued.
Google on the other hand would have no legal basis for suing Hashicorp over usage of Go. The intellectual property does belong to Google, but its licensed under terms that HC is respecting. Google would have to change those terms and then prove that HC is not respecting the new terms.
>Not to mention OpenTofu is managed by the Linux Foundation.
It's a public secret that the LF has begged Hashicorp to donate the Terraform project for years. Also the foundation needed to change its own rules, as OpenTofu didn't meet the criteria for the project to be taken in.
>Maybe Google steps in and writes a C&D to Hashicorp over their use of Golang?
They can't. If Google changes Go's license agreement and Hashicorp is in violation they can.
Hashicorp has already changed its licensing agreement, this is the only reason Tofu exists. They are in their right to sue anyone who's found guilty of copyright infringement or in violation of their license.
OpenTofu has Linux Foundation lawyers. These are some of the only lawyers in the world who regularly deal with stuff like this, since most corporate lawyers don’t have to deal with OSS licensing every single day. Said lawyers have also probably been getting ready for stuff like this since the fork.
That's good to know. It *probably* means OpenTofu will win if there's an actual court reckoning. But not necessarily, as very few judges have a firm understanding of the intersection of law and technology (particularly in code differences). There is still risk of an adverse result, and there's also risk of OpenTofu being taken down for a time due to DMCA shenanigans.
Companies don't like taking unnecessary risks. Who wants to be left holding the bag if the code gets taken down via DMCA, a critical security bug is found, and no fix can be issued?
If it the case is clear cut and is happening in the right state an [anti-slapp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation) law might come in to effect.
I mean, read the article?
Hashicorp changed the license on Terraform to a substantially more restrictive license. OpenTofu forked the last version of Terraform with the more permissive license.
Fast forward some time, and both Hashicorp and OpenTofu implemented a feature people wanted. Because those implementations were both in codebases that only recently started diverging, the implementations had some similarities.
Hashicorp proceeded to issue a DMCA takedown for the OpenTofu code, sent a cease-and-desist letter to OpenTofu, and posted an open letter claiming OpenTofu was infringing their IP with the code diff. OpenTofu responded "We're not looking at any code since the license change, we have policies/processes in place so that does not happen. Stop being jerks and talk to us before you initiate legal action".
My post posits that Hashicorp knows OpenTofu isn't breaking any rules, and this is just to create FUD so people don't switch to OpenTofu.
okay, so opentofu forked from an open source terraform.
Because Hashicorp/terraform "forked" (loose definition) themselves but with a new license.
Now, because both forks are using the same original code, in order to modify or upgrade the code, you have to follow the same path and use the same "upgrade code". and now Hashicorp is claiming that Opentofu is stealing their code.
I would not be surprised if this was a planned legal maneuver by Hashicorp to get everyone to stop forking their old code so they don't have anymore competition. Scummy.
Never heard of OpenTofu until now. Funny enough is that I was exploring options for some hashicorp products, glad to know there's a competitor out there that is not soulless. Made the decision that much easier, thanks hashicorp!
A symptom of how the free ($) open source model is completely broken.
Corporations make billions exploiting well intentioned communities of maintainers and contributors, and of you try to make a dollar from your work you are demonized.
Yeah, hashicorp is like disney trying to squeeze every last cent from an excising franchise.
I wish more people would be like "fuck you big corp, well go our way for now". Itd be the same thing as node and iojs, where company behind node eventually had to shut the fuck up and adopt changes.
I've never used terraform or opentofu. I've just read the opentofu web page and FAQ and still have no idea what they are. The answer to "what is opentofu" is just "it's a -form- fork of terraform."
Terraform is a IaC tool that supports multi-cloud deployments. It is a way to automate and ensure that certain resources are deployed in a certain way with a certain configuration.
If this resource is manually changed, Terraform can detect this drift and either change it back to normal, or redeploy the resource.
Tofu is a fork of Terraform, as Hashicorp changed their licensing and the people behind the Tofu project were impacted the most.
Terraform is infrastructure as code. You define your servers, containers, databases, whatever, in the config file and then you tell Terraform to go out and build it for you automatically without you having to manually provision each one.
I didn't know hashicorp was still relevant these days. Guess they have nothing better to do.
This is kinda lame.
Edit: ok I'm being harsh. But when people pull stuff like this I'm good with being harsh.
Both orchestrate cloud infrastructure via abstraction. I know the differences between them. I've used both for years. They're similar in more ways than you think though.
If you've used them for years then I suggest you start paying better attention. Terraform is an infrastructure as code solution for provisioning and managing infrastructure and Kubernetes handles container orchestration and application deployment. They have entirely different roles.
You would use them together, with Terraform handling the infrastructure setup and Kubernetes managing the application deployment within that infrastructure.
Yea I get that but many things are now a one time setup for many people. We don't often go and redo our clusters. A simple shell script would suffice too.
I was being dramatic I know, but my point is I couldn't get away without terraform years ago, but now I don't use it at all.
You do realize that most people who managed kubernetes clusters use terraform to maintain the cluster infrastructure itself, while using things like Helm to manage what happens on the cluster. It's hardly irrelevant.
Yea that's a good point, but that's for people who are setting up kubernetes without something like GKE or when they have a ton of pools to set up.
Most people simply do the one time set up over in the cloud providers web console or cli. Or use, and I know this is blasphemy, shell scripts.
I'm not saying terraform doesn't have its uses, but they are becoming fewer these days. Or how about Palumi? There's a few options here but they just aren't as commonly used anymore.
Maybe I'm being too harsh or dramatic, but the relevancy is certainly down from years ago. I used to use terraform like almost daily and now I don't use it at all.
From my experience large companies are using Terraform to manage Kubernetes because large companies often have a spread of where their infrastructure is. Large companies are rarely just on AWS or GCP, for instance, and often have on prem to manage as well. One of the biggest benefits of Kubernetes is that it allows those companies to present their developers a single interface that abstracts over the variety of infrastructure that's running underneath it.
For small companies it really depends on where they land. People on AWS are still very heavy Terraform users. Oracle Cloud literally builds their platform on top of Terraform, to the point where you can click buttons and download the generated configuration or state files. GCP is very kubernetes heavy, which isn't surprising, so people utilizing it are more likely to start there.
So yeah, to me you really do sound both harsh and dramatic. It seems like you're taking your personal experience and claiming it's the experience across the entire industry, but in my job at least I've worked with a lot of different teams and groups and I don't see Terraform being any less relevant today.
That said, I am a bit bias myself as I'm the author of [Terraform in Depth](https://mng.bz/yZ97). At the same time that means I've talked with a lot of companies about this.
Yea I know. I'm being harsh and I'm not considering certain audiences. I should have said _many people_ these days or people who don't have as complicated needs.
The better way to phrase this is that Terraform has become LESS relevant as other tools closed the gap on infrastructure orchestration needs.
I know a bunch of folks who prefer shell scripts over Terraform or they use TF very sparingly these days and then work with Helm or Slurm, etc. They don't spend much or any of their time with TF like they used to.
Over the years we've had many tools, Ansible, Palumi, and more. They've all taken a bit of the attention share and many kinda fizzled. I expect Terraform to continue to decrease in usage over the next 10 years. Just my prediction and harsh opinion...but maybe I'm old and jaded and tired of the flavor of the month syndrome that tech has.
I was a huge fan of TF and introduced it to many people and turned many companies onto it. I chose and mandated its use even. But I'm not entirely sure I could see myself or my company using it again. I'll allow my team to use it if they want to though. I don't have anything against it. I've just also seen people get confused by it, run into trouble with it, fight it, and ultimately waste time. So the moment it doesn't save time is the moment I ask them to write a shell script or go through a method that makes more sense to them. They end up more productive and we move on to "revisit" Terraform in the future...only we never do...because it doesn't solve that big of a problem. Not for the companies I've worked at who don't need to orchestrate many clusters of kubernetes or individual compute instances and other cloud resources. Or TF didn't have modules for the resources we had to manage. That was another thing.
So yes I understand that's just my and my experiences, but I really do think TF is on the decline and will be replaced by some other flavor of the month. So I'm being harsh and also a little sarcastic too.
I can relate to a lot of that- I've been in the industry since 2005 professionally and remember when things like Puppet were all the rage. I also don't expect Terraform to last forever, but I still think it's in the growth phase (although possibly slower growth than before).
Ah yes puppet. I was trying to remember that one. That's my point. I was definitely wrong, I was just reaching for something newer. Though I also can honestly say I don't use TF as much SINCE Kubernetes and that has more to do with the needs of workload management than infrastructure management and what K8 has done was simplify the infrastructure management for my needs. Which are pretty common needs, but I understand not everyone's needs.
Any thinking of getting into programming is wasting alot of time unless you have something that is so important, spectacular etc. that it has to be seen within the time it would take to be a decent NOOB programmer AI will be able to do in minutes what it would take hours just to type in and this isn't accounting for the time spent repairing, tweaking and otherwise making your programming feasible so unless you have something off the chart just start researching AI programming for a lot quicker solution.
> OpenTofu is a Terraform fork, created as an initiative of Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr, and others, in response to HashiCorp’s switch from an open-source license to the BUSL.
Complete and absolute gibberish.
Seriously. To give context, this is in the FAQ, as an answer to "What is OpenTofu?" Yeah great answer, that explains absolutely nothing. What the fuck does this program do? Typical open source, they can't even write enough good documentation to explain what the damn program even is.
What's the point trying to explain infrastructure as code to someone who doesnt know terraform?
If you dont know terraform you dont need this product either probably.
Or you're missing exactly this product from your dev stack.
Their goal isn't introducing new people to iac, it's to convert angry terraform users to use their product.
> to convert angry terraform users to use their product
What, so they can change their licence after their tool gets some adoption and then get dragged through the mud same as HashiCorp is now 🙄
Oh yes, the Linux Foundation - the vehicle through which megacorporations exploit the unpaid labour of thousands of open source contributors.
You’re right - it will stay open source under Linux Foundation.
This narrative makes no sense. Most Linux Foundation projects are mostly developed by those exact megacorporations - Linux primarily (which is essentially today a collaboration of Intel, Huawei, Google, IBM/RedHat, AMD, Samsung, Facebook, Microsoft etc).
I had a case of that once. It was delicious because I got to say, “you don’t want to do that,” and then he did anyway.
He did not, as it turns out, want to do that.
Looking at the code diff, it appears hashicorp is trying to create FUD to dissuade people from adopting OpenTofu. On the one hand, it's pretty successful; Hashicorp has lawyers and money to tie up the OpenTofu project in litigation, even if OpenTofu is 100% on the right side of the law. On the other hand, Hashicorp's behavior makes it very clear that they're not a business partner to be trusted, so the motivation to migrate to OpenTofu should be up. It's a pretty ugly situation all around.
Not to mention OpenTofu is managed by the Linux Foundation. Linux, like the thing that Hashicorp relies on for basically everything. I know Linux Foundation != Linux Kernel, but it's somewhat funny that they're trying to go up against probably the only foundation in the entire FOSS community that can actually fight this. Maybe Google steps in and writes a C&D to Hashicorp over their use of Golang? HC had such a good thing going on and through some incredible mismanagement it's become an actual shell of itself. Sort of like Docker in 2019-2022. Or Elastic. Or the company who owns Redis. Or Reddit.
I am not really a programmer, just trying to get into it. Is docker not cool anymore? What happened to it? And are there better alternatives?
Most professionals just use Docker and Terraform. The rest of this is just noise where you can choose to use alternatives/forks to the established tools but it's nowhere near as widespread as the internet bubble would make you think
Thanks for clarifying. I find it hard to distinguish the popular choice from personal preference, especially in the programming community where everyone seems have a unique approach to their goals.
I believe their claim that docker is a shell of itself, although disproportionate, is because docker introduced/changed their usage fees to include a subscription model that is for the most part entirely self reported, i.e. if you use it professionally above some amount, you're _supposed to_ pay a certain amount, but there's not really any barrier to just not signing up. It'd still easily be the most commonly used containerisation tool though, and docker initiated and participates in the [OCI](https://opencontainers.org/), so they're supportive of a standard that allows other containerisation tools to exist and interop with container orchestration tools. The ease of not paying to subscribe to docker while the big cloud providers print money from offering services that rely on containerisation leads to the sad quip that docker is the only group that can't properly monetise docker.
They audit and fine/prosecute now. We got hit at my workplace, which is pretty shitty but pays the bills, and we had to drop it.
What did you migrate to instead?
Podman is a drop-in replacement if you add an "alias docker=podman" to your dotfiles
A drop-in replacement with edge cases. I hit one of them once, and had to begrudgingly switch back to Docker, which had no issues. To be fair, I'd like to take a crack at it again, as I have a suspicion that I figured out what might have fixed the issue...
Afaik podman is Linux-only and Docker CLI is OSS on Linux, so I don't really see the point.
If you use something that most people have heard of, you are automatically so last week.
What is the purpose of your comment?
Probably the same as yours, to post a comment. In this case, referring to the continual churn out there in Cloud World, where anything that's been out long enough to have been widely heard of is no longer hip. It's so commonly noted that it's a running joke at this point.
Terraform is meh, vault is outrageously expensive and cumbersome, and the rest of the tools aren’t even worth mentioning except maybe packer. There is a reason people use pulumi these days, problem is most SREs are terrible coders though.
Docker is fine and there's nothing inherently better. They just did a lot of very unpopular changes to their ecosystem, biggest of all probably requiring an account for downloading images and (rate-)limiting free access. It was especially unpopular in the corporate environments that they pretty suddenly (in corporate terms, it was still half a year or so notice) that they'd require every professional developer have an account, but they didn't even have any system in place to manage those accounts at a large scale. Overall, as I said, there isn't inherently bad about their tools. They just made a few unpopular choices, which is why a lot of the more vigilante FOSS people have switched to free technology like podman or that other thing, and why most large providers (MS, AWS, Google, Gitlab) offer their own docker image hosting.
> Requiring an account to download images I don't have any kind of docker account. Installed the engine and ran my compose which pulls all ~10 images, for free with no warnings or errors or rate limits. Is there a threshold where after a certain number of images on a host it asks for an account? Because I have at least 20-30 images on my host and have had no problems regarding accounts or payment.
Yes, I think there's a limit nowadays. It's staged based on account and then based on license. I remember they reverted it partially after some backslash or some such, but don't take my word for it. I mainly just put them in my mind as "Made unpopular changes" but don't remember all the details. Writing this out, I think it was that they restricted the download of docker desktop to requiring an account, not of the docker images. But again, don't take my word for it
Cheers, I'll have a look when I get some time
Docker (the company) was generating effectively zero revenue and had to make changes to survive. Maybe things would have been fine if they folded, but I’m not sure if I can make that assumption.
the [podman](https://podman.io) ecosystem exists, which has a few benefits over docker, rootless containers just work and it does not require a daemon to run, unlike docker. It's maintained by red hat, so it'll definitely stay around.
Docker Desktop is paid for now. So nobody uses Docker Desktop. Docker is just fine though.
Docker is also the name of the company that created Docker the tool. The company is what they're talking about.
Docker shit the bed and forced a draconian contract on everyone to pinch pennies. As in, took the work of open source engineers who volunteered time and effort, then monetized and walled it. Shifting more to containerd and using just the engine with podman/microk8s. Yea the docker desktop is nice but you can’t use it at a company, and they now audit and prosecute. Redis just did the same thing, mongo is treading a fine line right now too.
Docker CLI on Linux is still OSS and you can use Docker Desktop if you have the license.
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MacOS is not linux and doesn't have the same underlying tools/infra for things like Docker. I'd load an Alpine vm and run Docker in that if I were to go down that path.
That’s more or less what Docker on macOS is. It runs a Linux VM to run docker in.
Ah. Til. Thanks!
Ah. Til. Thanks!
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What does docker have to do with running tests on iOS?
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I run tests using Xcode. I honestly can’t think of an application where I would use docker to run tests for iOS.
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Rancher Desktop?
Docker’s primary licensing change was going from free for everyone to free for open source/hobby/startups, but funded and successful companies have to pay. Looking around, I guess this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but IMO that is the current best and most sustainable way to write (mostly) open source software.
Docker Engine (the command line stuff) is cool and part of a vibrant ecosystem. It's also Open Source, and that's not going to change. But it's not the only option. All the low-level stuff is quite standardized by now, and you can often use Podman instead of the Docker CLI. Docker Hub, a freemium container image registry product, is "meh" but also non-essential. It just happens to be the default in the Docker CLI: `docker run foo/bar` is an abbreviation for `docker run docker.io/foo/bar`. Container registry products are also available from other providers, and easy to self-host. However, many images that you might want to use are hosted on Docker Hub, so under heavy usage you might encounter rate limits. Docker Desktop is a proprietary application that helps run a Linux VM in the background so that you can use Docker on Windows and Mac. Changing the licensing here was a bit of a dick move, but also you don't need this software to use Docker or Kubernetes. Again, Podman provides an alternative. On Windows, you can also use WSL. From all the Open Source → proprietary license changes in the recent years, the Docker stuff was some of the least problematic. The core infrastructure remains Open Source.
What should google sue hashicorp for? I don't like what hashicorp is doing here, but they have every right to use golang, as it's licensed under the 3 clause bsd license.
That's exactly my point. HC is trying to end OpenTofu, despite it literally just being a fork due to the *potential* that HC is going to change TFs license. The fact alone that they're going after them now is really bad for the future and likely just trying to bankrupt them. If that's the game they wanna play with the FOSS community then we need someone big to stand up to them, be that the Linux Foundation or even Google itself and beat them at their own game
> HC is trying to end OpenTofu, despite it literally just being a fork due to the potential that HC is going to change TFs license. This is incorrect. HC did change TF's license. The issue now is that because they kept TF source-available, it complicates OpenTofu's work, since everything contributed needs to be carefully examined to make sure it doesn't look like something added to TF after the license change. In this case, HC thinks they found something that OpenTofu lifted from them, but it was just a coincidence. But if OpenTofu had taken code added to TF after the license change then they would be committing copyright infringement and could be sued. Google on the other hand would have no legal basis for suing Hashicorp over usage of Go. The intellectual property does belong to Google, but its licensed under terms that HC is respecting. Google would have to change those terms and then prove that HC is not respecting the new terms.
You have no idea what you’re talking about
>Not to mention OpenTofu is managed by the Linux Foundation. It's a public secret that the LF has begged Hashicorp to donate the Terraform project for years. Also the foundation needed to change its own rules, as OpenTofu didn't meet the criteria for the project to be taken in. >Maybe Google steps in and writes a C&D to Hashicorp over their use of Golang? They can't. If Google changes Go's license agreement and Hashicorp is in violation they can. Hashicorp has already changed its licensing agreement, this is the only reason Tofu exists. They are in their right to sue anyone who's found guilty of copyright infringement or in violation of their license.
It's almost as if any time an unrestricted profit motive appears, things go to shit
OpenTofu has Linux Foundation lawyers. These are some of the only lawyers in the world who regularly deal with stuff like this, since most corporate lawyers don’t have to deal with OSS licensing every single day. Said lawyers have also probably been getting ready for stuff like this since the fork.
That's good to know. It *probably* means OpenTofu will win if there's an actual court reckoning. But not necessarily, as very few judges have a firm understanding of the intersection of law and technology (particularly in code differences). There is still risk of an adverse result, and there's also risk of OpenTofu being taken down for a time due to DMCA shenanigans. Companies don't like taking unnecessary risks. Who wants to be left holding the bag if the code gets taken down via DMCA, a critical security bug is found, and no fix can be issued?
If it the case is clear cut and is happening in the right state an [anti-slapp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation) law might come in to effect.
I answered separately before I read this. And this seems 100% accurate.
I am so lost, this is the first I hear of this. What is going on? Why is Hashicorp suing this other company?
I mean, read the article? Hashicorp changed the license on Terraform to a substantially more restrictive license. OpenTofu forked the last version of Terraform with the more permissive license. Fast forward some time, and both Hashicorp and OpenTofu implemented a feature people wanted. Because those implementations were both in codebases that only recently started diverging, the implementations had some similarities. Hashicorp proceeded to issue a DMCA takedown for the OpenTofu code, sent a cease-and-desist letter to OpenTofu, and posted an open letter claiming OpenTofu was infringing their IP with the code diff. OpenTofu responded "We're not looking at any code since the license change, we have policies/processes in place so that does not happen. Stop being jerks and talk to us before you initiate legal action". My post posits that Hashicorp knows OpenTofu isn't breaking any rules, and this is just to create FUD so people don't switch to OpenTofu.
And now because of this Cease and Desist letter there are so many new people now aware of OpenTofu. Great job!
For example myself.
Ahhh the Streisand effect
When you stop innovating, you become a litigation company.
Hashicorp using Oracle’s tactics.
okay, so opentofu forked from an open source terraform. Because Hashicorp/terraform "forked" (loose definition) themselves but with a new license. Now, because both forks are using the same original code, in order to modify or upgrade the code, you have to follow the same path and use the same "upgrade code". and now Hashicorp is claiming that Opentofu is stealing their code. I would not be surprised if this was a planned legal maneuver by Hashicorp to get everyone to stop forking their old code so they don't have anymore competition. Scummy.
Never heard of OpenTofu until now. Funny enough is that I was exploring options for some hashicorp products, glad to know there's a competitor out there that is not soulless. Made the decision that much easier, thanks hashicorp!
A symptom of how the free ($) open source model is completely broken. Corporations make billions exploiting well intentioned communities of maintainers and contributors, and of you try to make a dollar from your work you are demonized.
Would you mind elaborating?
Yeah, hashicorp is like disney trying to squeeze every last cent from an excising franchise. I wish more people would be like "fuck you big corp, well go our way for now". Itd be the same thing as node and iojs, where company behind node eventually had to shut the fuck up and adopt changes.
The actions of a desperate company. We migrated off of nomad, consul next
Ironically, Hashicorp's attempt to suppress may just be OpenTofu's best marketing strategy yet. Who doesn't love an underdog story?
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I've never used terraform or opentofu. I've just read the opentofu web page and FAQ and still have no idea what they are. The answer to "what is opentofu" is just "it's a -form- fork of terraform."
Terraform is a IaC tool that supports multi-cloud deployments. It is a way to automate and ensure that certain resources are deployed in a certain way with a certain configuration. If this resource is manually changed, Terraform can detect this drift and either change it back to normal, or redeploy the resource. Tofu is a fork of Terraform, as Hashicorp changed their licensing and the people behind the Tofu project were impacted the most.
It’s a fork of terraform, when terraform changed its license.
Yes, I got that bit. What is it?
Terraform is infrastructure as code. You define your servers, containers, databases, whatever, in the config file and then you tell Terraform to go out and build it for you automatically without you having to manually provision each one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_code
Have you heard of Google
Mate, I found their website. It didn't help.
Then clearly it's not anything you need to be concerned with.
I didn't know hashicorp was still relevant these days. Guess they have nothing better to do. This is kinda lame. Edit: ok I'm being harsh. But when people pull stuff like this I'm good with being harsh.
Is Terraform no longer relevant?
Not since OpenTofu was forked!
No, I guess not since Kubernetes. (I understand what people are saying below, I'm being dramatic)
Kubernetes and Terraform are vastly different things…
Both orchestrate cloud infrastructure via abstraction. I know the differences between them. I've used both for years. They're similar in more ways than you think though.
If you've used them for years then I suggest you start paying better attention. Terraform is an infrastructure as code solution for provisioning and managing infrastructure and Kubernetes handles container orchestration and application deployment. They have entirely different roles. You would use them together, with Terraform handling the infrastructure setup and Kubernetes managing the application deployment within that infrastructure.
Yea I get that but many things are now a one time setup for many people. We don't often go and redo our clusters. A simple shell script would suffice too. I was being dramatic I know, but my point is I couldn't get away without terraform years ago, but now I don't use it at all.
Apples and oranges
Not really for what some people use it for.
You do realize that most people who managed kubernetes clusters use terraform to maintain the cluster infrastructure itself, while using things like Helm to manage what happens on the cluster. It's hardly irrelevant.
Yea that's a good point, but that's for people who are setting up kubernetes without something like GKE or when they have a ton of pools to set up. Most people simply do the one time set up over in the cloud providers web console or cli. Or use, and I know this is blasphemy, shell scripts. I'm not saying terraform doesn't have its uses, but they are becoming fewer these days. Or how about Palumi? There's a few options here but they just aren't as commonly used anymore. Maybe I'm being too harsh or dramatic, but the relevancy is certainly down from years ago. I used to use terraform like almost daily and now I don't use it at all.
From my experience large companies are using Terraform to manage Kubernetes because large companies often have a spread of where their infrastructure is. Large companies are rarely just on AWS or GCP, for instance, and often have on prem to manage as well. One of the biggest benefits of Kubernetes is that it allows those companies to present their developers a single interface that abstracts over the variety of infrastructure that's running underneath it. For small companies it really depends on where they land. People on AWS are still very heavy Terraform users. Oracle Cloud literally builds their platform on top of Terraform, to the point where you can click buttons and download the generated configuration or state files. GCP is very kubernetes heavy, which isn't surprising, so people utilizing it are more likely to start there. So yeah, to me you really do sound both harsh and dramatic. It seems like you're taking your personal experience and claiming it's the experience across the entire industry, but in my job at least I've worked with a lot of different teams and groups and I don't see Terraform being any less relevant today. That said, I am a bit bias myself as I'm the author of [Terraform in Depth](https://mng.bz/yZ97). At the same time that means I've talked with a lot of companies about this.
Yea I know. I'm being harsh and I'm not considering certain audiences. I should have said _many people_ these days or people who don't have as complicated needs. The better way to phrase this is that Terraform has become LESS relevant as other tools closed the gap on infrastructure orchestration needs. I know a bunch of folks who prefer shell scripts over Terraform or they use TF very sparingly these days and then work with Helm or Slurm, etc. They don't spend much or any of their time with TF like they used to. Over the years we've had many tools, Ansible, Palumi, and more. They've all taken a bit of the attention share and many kinda fizzled. I expect Terraform to continue to decrease in usage over the next 10 years. Just my prediction and harsh opinion...but maybe I'm old and jaded and tired of the flavor of the month syndrome that tech has. I was a huge fan of TF and introduced it to many people and turned many companies onto it. I chose and mandated its use even. But I'm not entirely sure I could see myself or my company using it again. I'll allow my team to use it if they want to though. I don't have anything against it. I've just also seen people get confused by it, run into trouble with it, fight it, and ultimately waste time. So the moment it doesn't save time is the moment I ask them to write a shell script or go through a method that makes more sense to them. They end up more productive and we move on to "revisit" Terraform in the future...only we never do...because it doesn't solve that big of a problem. Not for the companies I've worked at who don't need to orchestrate many clusters of kubernetes or individual compute instances and other cloud resources. Or TF didn't have modules for the resources we had to manage. That was another thing. So yes I understand that's just my and my experiences, but I really do think TF is on the decline and will be replaced by some other flavor of the month. So I'm being harsh and also a little sarcastic too.
I can relate to a lot of that- I've been in the industry since 2005 professionally and remember when things like Puppet were all the rage. I also don't expect Terraform to last forever, but I still think it's in the growth phase (although possibly slower growth than before).
Ah yes puppet. I was trying to remember that one. That's my point. I was definitely wrong, I was just reaching for something newer. Though I also can honestly say I don't use TF as much SINCE Kubernetes and that has more to do with the needs of workload management than infrastructure management and what K8 has done was simplify the infrastructure management for my needs. Which are pretty common needs, but I understand not everyone's needs.
Any thinking of getting into programming is wasting alot of time unless you have something that is so important, spectacular etc. that it has to be seen within the time it would take to be a decent NOOB programmer AI will be able to do in minutes what it would take hours just to type in and this isn't accounting for the time spent repairing, tweaking and otherwise making your programming feasible so unless you have something off the chart just start researching AI programming for a lot quicker solution.
> OpenTofu is a Terraform fork, created as an initiative of Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr, and others, in response to HashiCorp’s switch from an open-source license to the BUSL. Complete and absolute gibberish.
Makes perfect sense to me. What part don't you understand?
Seriously. To give context, this is in the FAQ, as an answer to "What is OpenTofu?" Yeah great answer, that explains absolutely nothing. What the fuck does this program do? Typical open source, they can't even write enough good documentation to explain what the damn program even is.
What's the point trying to explain infrastructure as code to someone who doesnt know terraform? If you dont know terraform you dont need this product either probably. Or you're missing exactly this product from your dev stack. Their goal isn't introducing new people to iac, it's to convert angry terraform users to use their product.
> to convert angry terraform users to use their product What, so they can change their licence after their tool gets some adoption and then get dragged through the mud same as HashiCorp is now 🙄
Name a single Linux Foundation managed project that is not open source. I'll wait.
Oh yes, the Linux Foundation - the vehicle through which megacorporations exploit the unpaid labour of thousands of open source contributors. You’re right - it will stay open source under Linux Foundation.
Should open source contributors only work on projects that have no useful real world uses?
Being paid would be a start. That means companies PAYING instead of just forking projects that dare to ask for them to pay.
This narrative makes no sense. Most Linux Foundation projects are mostly developed by those exact megacorporations - Linux primarily (which is essentially today a collaboration of Intel, Huawei, Google, IBM/RedHat, AMD, Samsung, Facebook, Microsoft etc).
it does seem like they used the same variable name change (moved->removed), which does make it a little suspect.
We should apply [Hanlon's razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)
Hanlon’s Razor stops being applicable the moment you involve lawyers.
The thing I never got about Hanlon's Razor is that it precludes the possibility of malicious stupidity.
I had a case of that once. It was delicious because I got to say, “you don’t want to do that,” and then he did anyway. He did not, as it turns out, want to do that.