It will affect categories of business users (programmers) who currently embrace terraform: amazon, google, microsoft, oracle, alibaba cloud.
Like it or not, cohorts of engineering organizations like the above (cloud providers) have a very outsized weight and already have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow.
From the article:
The license does not allow you to use Terraform if you meet both of the following conditions:
You are building a product that is competitive with HashiCorp.
You embed or host Terraform in your product.
My $0.02: the management of hashicorp is following a stupid trend and should have thought about their customers more.
It will come out to what lawyers think, I guess. Lawyers usually say no to things with poorly established precedent.
> As usual in OSS-goes-private events these all just sound like “keep building our critical infrastructure tool for free or we will go elsewhere”.
If Terraform was 100% developed by HashiCorp employees that would be fair description. It's more like "We're the only company allowed to make money off of the codebase you contributed to."
> What is hashicorp or any other company in their position to do?
I'd suggest paying developers to write proprietary code. That way they could just sell a product they fully own instead of having to pull this bullshit re-licensing of an open source codebase.
Like it or not, cohorts of engineering organizations like the above (cloud providers) have a very outsized weight and already have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow.
From the article:
The license does not allow you to use Terraform if you meet both of the following conditions: You are building a product that is competitive with HashiCorp. You embed or host Terraform in your product.
My $0.02: the management of hashicorp is following a stupid trend and should have thought about their customers more.
It will come out to what lawyers think, I guess. Lawyers usually say no to things with poorly established precedent.