Re:OpenTF Repository is now Public
by johannes1234321 on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @01:27PM
(#37395024)
> Plugins are developed by or at least with third parties. It's a gatekeeper of an ecosystem that at this point is a common good.
While I guess that for many vendors they don't care whether it's open or not. For instance AWS. I doubt they truly care about it being open or not.
Re:OpenTF Repository is now Public
by fishnchips on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @01:37PM
(#37395153)
AWS probably doesn't care much for it being closed either. But the benefit of being open is that folks can investigate, report and fix bugs. For example, at Spacelift we found a fascinating corner case where an RDS DB could be dropped if the call to get its details resulted in a transient API error. We wouldn't be able to do it if the code wasn't open. I also believe that the AWS provider in particular gets quite a bit of attention from the community outside Hashi and AWS.
All the providers are still MPL licensed, however. Maybe I'm missing something, but what part of the license change for Terraform core prevents someone from investigating and fixing a bug in the AWS provider in a similar manner going forward?
Even Terraform core remains source available and so 'community' users can still take a look at the source code and identify/report/fix errors.
Re:OpenTF Repository is now Public
by fishnchips on Tuesday September 05, 2023 @06:01PM
(#37398376)
Oh, the core license change is irrelevant here, and the providers are MPL.
I was just responding to a comment on how AWS didn't care if the provider was open. IMO there's value for them in it being open.
Well that's the core problem - what is the product here. Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise are products for sure. They're not open source, though. Is Terraform a product? Well, it doesn't do anything on its own, it requires plugins ("providers") for anything it does. Plugins are developed by or at least with third parties. It's a gatekeeper of an ecosystem that at this point is a common good.
Whether the ecosystem would exist without the permissive license and external contributions - really hard to say. But if your main play is to foster the growth of an ecosystem and then turn it into a product exclusive to your business, then I guess you should look for alternatives.
(Marcin from OpenTF, private opinion)