Cute punny name, I like it. Congrats on joining the LF, and keep up the good work!

By the way, are there any plans for taking on other HashiCorp products as well? (Packer and Nomad are of particular interest to me :-)

The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad.

Open Source businesses have no future in a world where big tech can gulp your product for free.

The OpenTofu folks will probably even raise capital to support commercialization of their thing at some point.

HashiCorp could pull it off, but I think moving everything to BSL overnight is just way too aggressive. I also don't think it's Amazon they are afraid of, but rather the other “cloud Terraform” providers (who unsurprisingly are the ones behind the fork).

For my own project [1], I'm planning on keeping the basic edition open and maybe adding an enterprise edition later on under BSL – basically like MariaDB does. I think that's the most fair model you can do right now.

[1]: https://lunni.dev/, a Docker Swarm dashboard

Which HashiCorp OSS product is Amazon hosting for clients as part of their cloud offering?

Their stuff pretty much all competes with it.

I generally like your takes but this one isn't very good since it wasn't Amazon that was the threat.

HashiCorp couldn't compete. Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. I worked at two companies who rejected them because their pricing was so ludicrous. The TACoS space of small startups nimbly out-competed these bad offerings.

Rent-seeking because you weren't able to compete with tiny startups able to effectively value add where you didn't is a bad strategy that pisses people off. I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends.

Corporations didn't seem to understand that when you participate in the OSS ecosystem you don't just get to trade on the name recognition. Or if you do, and you renege on those promises, you're going to get a lot of people very angry.

So now we have companies going BSL because they didn't have a good business plan to begin with and this is their dying gasp to own the space so someone will pay them and not their much smarter, more creative, startup competitors.

This, so much this.

HashiCorp pricing just made it simply impossible to pay them.

Their plan was to provide a free offering that was very good, get companies hooked, and then charge our the nose for any enterprisy feature.

The problem was how they charged, which they don't reveal until after you contact sales. You could build a solution using the free offering that works very well. Then years later want something paid offerings and contact sales and find out that they charge over 1000USD per clients, and you have 1000 clients. Oops, guess I'm just going to engineer my own solution for that. 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational.

It's really hard to go to management and say this open source thing we are running and serving the companies needs will now cost millions of dollars.

Though I understand HashiCorp position somewhat. I'm sure their sales team has repeatedly heard that a potential client has decided they don't need the feature they called about since the free solution is good enough and can engineer around any short commons.

> 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational

Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp.

Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost.

At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.

You missed my point I think.

Terraform is immensely valuable.

The open source bits is 90% of that value.

An enterprise will _already_ have a team managing terraform infra. Them building the parts they need from that remaining 10% may be cheaper then paying HashiCorp. This is a difficult sell.

Also, a ton of Terraform's value comes from the fact that there are modules for everything. Some or developed by HashiCorp but most are developed by vendors or even users who want terraform support.

A global enterprise can pay a whole team of senior engineers in Warsaw or Cluj for a million a year.

You've either done a lot of tech sales yourself or bought into the kool-aid software salespeople hand out. Their bread and butter is overstating per-engineer costs and hardware ownership costs, but it doesn't mean they're right.

In many places in europe you can hire a team of ~10 engineers already fully loaded for $1 million a year, or like 2 seniors and 4 midlevels or any combo like this. This is based off of 1st hand experience hiring for these salaries.

Yeah, but it buys 3 senior consultants, and they’re a fixed cost/capital expense and can be cut at any time. Operationally, it’s not that expensive to keep a Terraform platform floating. It’s expensive to build, and most companies need it yesterday. But bring in 3 people to support a team to build it in a year, then cut them free when it’s in v1, and leave your team to iterate and update. And now you’re not paying $1mm a year or more after that forever.

I think the point is that those three senior engineers could figure out how to do some SAML wrapper or remote execution on top of Open-Source Terraform instead of paying for the turn-key “Enterprise” features.

> I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends.

Couldn’t keep out a personal dig at Mitchell, who happens to be one of the most unproblematic people at Hashicorp and certainly doesn’t care or participate much in governance ? Seems like a lot of personal feelings were packed into this innocuous-posturing statement.

It wasn't innocuous or posturing. I actually pack my real feelings about a whole range of topics under this pseudonym all the time. And no, I don't particularly like Mitchell.

In this context I don't see your point. If I remember correctly, Hashimoto was the founder/CEO when Hashicorp products were being released as Open Source. Now he is no longer in charge (doing some development work I think) and someone else took the decision to change the license to BSL. So I don't see any relevancy here.

> Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic.

To clarify: the products themselves were and still are very good, with minor quirks.

As for pricing, there is a class of companies that set extremely high margins (this doesn't apply just to Hashicorp, see the the pricing of Gruntwork which I believe contributes to OpenTofu). This game reduces the number of customers but also the number of problems you need to deal with. This strategy is perfectly fine and I have no complaints - I built my own HA Vault cluster solution and used remote AWS backend instead of Hashicorp Cloud. But the license change was a game changer - Hashicorp is still a strong player in the market, but no longer the default choice.

We actually used Gruntwork at a past company over paying HashiCorp for enterprise Terraform. Their prices then were around 5k for a ready to go Reference Architecture. Apart from that one-time cost which we didn't pay because we built an RA ourselves, Gruntwork's prices were extremely reasonable. I don't think the comparison here is fair unless Gruntwork's prices have dramatically changed since then (I just checked: seems the same now as it was then).

I also don't particularly agree with your clarification on my part. I think their products are slim on features especially in light of what you're paying and a Terraform shop should almost always be opting for a TACoS solution over HashiCorp's.

I have mixed feelings about that.

Yes, doing money on open source is hard, but on the other hand, the reason why you were successful was because you were open source in the first place and capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors which would've neither contributed nor adopted your product otherwise.

Imho, if you can't compete with other cloud offerings of your products then your cloud offering is weak. Competing with Amazon on prices is obviously hard, but not impossible, and it's easy to compete with them on customer service because it's your goddamn product and you should have the best expertise on it.

> capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors

Does this hypothesis really hold up? In my experience the contributor community remains small and often even dormant compared to the userbase of an opensource project only to take action if the project itself gets in turmoil (main developer leaves, bad takes on features etc.)

In the case of terraform the main interesting bit is not terraform itself but the modules.

What is the ratio of terraform dev vs third party dev in most popular terraform modules?

> The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad.

save themselves from others building a less shit version of terraform cloud.

This will happen anyway; what they could do is to gain some time, that's all. But long-term consequences will be serious, I'm not sure if it was worth it.

Open Source businesses have no future as Open Source businesses if they aren't using Open Source licences.

What I find odd in these situations, that have happened multiple times now, is the companies go straight from "weak" licenses like the MPL, straight to "source available" ones. Surely it would have been a good idea to try a strong copyleft licence like AGPL first.

AGPL is seen as a no-go by most companies. It's viewed as risky because the obligations associated with it are often unclear.

Surely those companies can pay for an alternative license then?

I’ve had this argument with people ad infinitum; it seems some people just see “AGPL” and any further thought process just stops.

“You could ask or pay for an alternate licence” or “you’re almost certainly not using this in a way that means you need to open source your entire product” and any other rational argument you can think of are just met with “yeah but agpl” and that’s apparently just the end of it.

The thing is, at that point, why not just put it under a proprietary license in the first place? Lots of companies simply don’t have AGPL on their list of legal approved open source licenses and they’re not going to change that for you.

Depends on why you want an open-source license in the first place.

If it's to bait in companies to use your product and then offer more features under a proprietary license, then something that's more attractive to companies like a permissive (corporate charity) license is a better choice. If it's to ensure that everyone who uses the software can contribute to the development, something like the GPL or AGPL is better.

There can be other reasons to pick a corporate charity license, of course, but encouraging corporations to use your software is certainly one of the most common.

Because AGPL is open source and not proprietary, that's the reason. Open source doesn't necessarily mean that anyone can use it as they please, they must abide by the terms of the license. If they don't want to, then they can find another project, or get a different license for it.

I get regularly harassed for having dared to publish a library under GPL license.

Developers are so entitled, they don't even ever reflect they are taking without giving back all the time.

The entire Grafana LGTM stack is phenomenal, and it’s widely used.

Grafana is dual licensed however since they, relatively recently, switched to AGPL.

Then they can pay for an alternative licence for their closed source project.

It's a win/win/win, open source projects will still support it, so you don't get the backlash from the community, while those who just want to take will either pay or find a different project.

With BSL and similar, you end up looking like the "bad guy", and the forkers look like the "good guys". With AGPL you will still look like the open source "good guy", and if someone makes a fork they look like money grabbing assholes.

I don’t know how effective it is in general but dual licensing like Grafana now does seems a reasonable option.

I assume there may be forks of the older code but I don’t actually know.

The problem is that as far as many corporations are concerned, AGPL doesn't count as "open source we dare to use", and thus a AGPL+commercial software vendor doesn't get the benefit of companies adopting the "non-Enterprise flavor" first/easily/via grassroots.

Well actually I struggle to think of any really positive associations for "tofu":

- a meat alternative missing any kind of taste, smell or texture (and I am actually open to meat alternatives, but I still avoid tofu if at all possible)

- in computing, the rectangles that get shown when a font doesn't support a Unicode character (thus the Noto(fu) font: https://fonts.google.com/noto)

I understand why the name change was needed, and "tofu" probably was the most straightforward alternative, but still...

Tofu is great, just misused as a meat alternative. The Chinese and Japanese don’t use it as a meat alternative (dishes like mapo tofu and agedashi tofu contain both meat/fish and tofu), they use it to provide textural support and contrast to rich, full-flavoured dishes.

If the negative association you have is because of its use in organic kale tofu salads and the like, that’s not exactly tofu’s problem.

It's not tofu's fault, but it kind of is tofu's problem imo. Until a couple of years ago I had pretty much the same view as GP, that tofu was bland with an unpleasant texture and I couldn't imagine anyone eating it for pleasure - based on my experiences of how it was cooked/served by restaurants and friends here in England.

Eventually I tried a tofu dish while sharing plates with a couple of vegan friends at a Chinese restaurant and was amazed at how tasty it was, so I then spent the time to figure out how to cook it in such a way that I actually enjoy! It's not exactly close to being my favourite ingredient, but I do now eat it fairly often since it's healthy and tasty.

I think this experience - being put off tofu by the amount of people who make awful tofu dishes under the justification of it being healthy and vegan - is quite common, and it would be great if more people can discover ways they actually enjoy it.

(Side note, my #1 favourite way of preparing Tofu is roughly this recipe - I'm away from my desk and can't remember the tweaks I made, but they're not significant: https://frommybowl.com/crispy-tofu-recipe/ Bake it following that recipe, then it's ready to chuck into a salad, or stir fry, or some sort of sauce, or...)

I think the reputation of tofu as bland is not dissimilar to people claiming to dislike veggies as bitter.

I mean, disliking a food because it was cooked incorrectly is the problem of the eater, not the food. I can cook a steak well-done, that doesn't mean all steak is now bad.

If you're going to be pedantic then clearly steak and tofu are both dead forms of protein so they don't care whether people eat them or not. When I said it's a problem for the food I obviously (I thought) meant that in western countries it's a problem from the point of view of it becoming a popular food.

It's a problem because it's cooked incorrectly in the Western world. That's again not the problem of the food itself but of people not learning to cook it properly.

I believe that achieving perfection in naming things is an elusive goal. This is not only because individuals often associate their own unique meanings with words, but also because a chosen name may inadvertently carry offensive connotations in different languages.

(in my opinion) Tofu is much better than the other alternative they suggested like Archo or EchoSphere.

Disclaimer - I also do some work with Env0 which is part of the OpenT(o)F(u) initiative

Tofu is not a "meat alternative". It's just a food, made from soy.

I like tofu much more than I like most meats.

Not all tofu lacks texture or flavour. You have only tried the simplest version I guess.

In fact stinky tofu is very common!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu

I'm aware of smoked tofu at least, but still, if you order, let's say, an Indian dish with tofu instead of meat, you usually get the "basic" tofu version.

We regularly eat tofo (tastes great) but never as a replacement for meat.

that's on you i think. quite a lot of people enjoy tofu and it's a cute name imo.

you need to widen your horizon more, mate.

most of the world loves tofu.

The old "billions of flies cannot be wrong" defense.

the billion of flies aren't wrong if you're a fly

What about people who don’t like Cocoa, CherryPY, CakePHP, BaCon (lesser known Basic to C converter), or other tools with names related to food?

We can’t accommodate everyone’s food preferences.

To make everyone happy I guess we’d have to call it Chef, and we can’t do that either.

My first thought was Tofu-dreg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project) which isn't really the association you want.

As much as I actually like tofu the food, I'd agree that OpenTofu isn't a great name.

If your experience of tofu is only the above, I completely understand your distaste for it. But I think you owe it to yourself to try better tofu, and not as a meat alternative. Tofu on its own doesn't have much flavour, but that's the point, you need to marinate it. Google can give you some tips (squeeze the water out, then soak it in something delicious -- hell, soak it in meat juices!), but I highly recommend trying some good, low moisture smoked firm tofu. It's so good, I often just snack on it, slicing it like a sausage. But it's also great in things like burritos to add a smokey kick. Try it!

Did you create a new account just for this comment? Love this energy! And, I agree, tofu is great.

> a meat alternative missing any kind of taste, smell or texture

1. It's traditionally not a meat alternative. 2. One should try properly cooked tofu before judging that it's "missing any kind of taste, smell or texture".

I think that's the point, right? They'd prefer Terraform, they're setting for Tofu. They say as much in the readme. It's pretty clever.

Aside: tofu done right is great. Nobody treating it as a meat substitute is doing it right.

1B+ asians eat tofu as a regular ingredient and not as a "meat alternative missing any kind of taste, smell or texture." In fact, not only are there DOZENS of kinds of tofu with wildly different textures and flavors, but even within a category, brands have big differences. The Japanese eat tofu uncooked and cold, drizzled with sauces (soy i.e. more soybean product!) and spices (ginger) - it's called hiyayakko, it's delicious and available as an inexpensive appetizer in most japanese restaurants and sushi bars.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hiyayakko

Adding to the many people who have already recommended tasty tofu recipes, one of my favorites is this crispy tofu recipe from the NYT:

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020993-tofu-and-green-b...

I read it as "Open-to-fu", which could be construed in another way :)

Surprisingly you're not the first! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37581454

Have you considered terrafork?

Sure. But names including “terra” would be even more risky. Someone suggested LunarSpoon though and I personally found it hilarious.

yeh thats like a cereal oats brand name hahha

Worked well for Cap'n Proto (the cerealization protocol)! https://capnproto.org/

This was funny :-)

Will the CLI be renamed to `tofu`?

Yep!

"OpenTofu" is cute, but tofu has nothing to do with terraforming.

How about "Genesis" or "Reliant" or "Marcus" or "Kruge"?

As a heavy terraform user who can't wait to migrate away from Hashicorp, I don't care. It's just a name. After the first dozen uses you won't even notice, it'll be as natural as any other command.

You're totally missing the point.

It's a nice pun and at the same time is close to the original, which would help Terraform users recognize the brand. Your suggestions are nice, but less recognizable in that way.

Maybe we can take that pun to extreme though! If they ever have a designer that can come up with some crazy lore of terraforming with tofu that would be really really awesome. But I think they have more pressing matters right now.

I was just hoping more HN readers would get the reference... :-(

I got the reference but meh I think you needed a better delivery so it was more clearly a joke

Probably worth editing and explaining the references, I didn't get it at all. Not all of us hang around here 24/7/365/2023.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

I just read the plot and now I understand the reference.

So it was a clever comment but not particularly a joke (maybe a not so good one?)

> designer that can come up with some crazy lore of terraforming with tofu

I have a feeling that the designer may find it... challenging.

I can imagine a piece of tofu with robotic arms terraforming stuff. Pretty easy.

Or a globe with a tofu on top. Make the tofu evil/insane and create a story it wants to transform every plant in tofu.

Or tofu being portrayed as this blank slate of a food that becomes something more when adding things around it.

I find the current logo to be genius though! It's like they took the Terraform logo, which to me looks like a cube that has fallen apart, and put it back together into a cute little cube of tofu.

terraform has nothing to do with terraforming either

You "terraform" the cloud.

I’ve always thought terraform was kind of a perfect name, making large-scale changes to thousands of resources with a single command really does feel like terraforming.

It absolutely does, in a metaphoric way:

It's just like the Genesis torpedo. You simply fire this torpedo from your starship at a (hopefully lifeless) planet or moon, and the Genesis Effect will re-form all the matter on the world, creating a world full of life, just the way you want it. You don't have to do any hard work like earth-moving, planting trees, etc., because the Genesis device does it all for you, quickly and automatically, according to your design.

terraform is the same: you just write a text file describing how you want a bunch of resources provisioned, run `terraform`, and it does all the work of provisioning those resources for you, quickly and automatically, according to your design. Honestly, I think it's a brilliant name.

it does.

tofu is short for torafurm.

it's done deal, mate. better spend your time on something else.

More aspirational… call it Mars

He tasks me... He tasks me and I shall have him!

Maybe... Garden of Eden Creation Kit?

I love a good Fallout 2 reference.

Why not OpenTransform?

Wny OpenTransform?

What?

I'm impressed by the speed at which you've forked the project and brought up the new technical infrastructure. You mention that you are 'interim tech lead'; what does interim mean in this context, and what is the governance structure for future leadership (and presumably your replacement)? Will OpenTofu have a self-selecting board? Or will it be democratic by vote, and if so, have suffrage by membership, participation or something else? Maybe top-down BDFL appointed by the Linux Foundation?

I am curious because your Manifesto states that as a result of LF stewardship the 'community governs the project'. The LF is massive, with a much more extensive portfolio than most people think, and influential far beyond its staffing would indicate. There is a great range of governance models and community norms across its projects, and, as with many things in FOSS leadership, no easy answer to the question of which the best option is among those.

As tech lead, it is your responsibility to choose what model and venue OpenTofu will adopt to fulfil its promises sustainably; I hope and imagine that you have been given the authority to make these choices decisively. The stewardship of the Linux Foundation is not an automatic guarantee of success, and the resources that the LF can provide are significant, unusual in FOSS, and very difficult to use - and concerningly easy to abuse unless directed by clear leadership. I wish you all the best of luck in this challenging but exciting task, and am curious to discover how you intend to take this project forward into the future.

Thanks for the kind words!

The initiative will have a steering committee composed of individuals from the main backing and involved companies and projects.

As interim technical lead I'm mostly responsible for the technical side of things and getting the project up and running in this first phase. This also includes the feature development process and similar things. Interim means "until we figure out the exact details of the governance process", so a couple of weeks, most likely.

Representatives of the main organizations backing the initiative are collaborating with the LF to iron out the governance model. In practice, all of this is a collaborative process among the main backers.

The initial steering committee has already been selected and was to my knowledge a prerequisite to even being accepted to the LF.

I appreciate the detailed response; thank you! It is wonderful that the governance structure is being thought out early. The best of luck to you and your colleagues in this endeavour!

Will there be any effort to rebrand the Hashicorp Configuration Language?

Congrats! I was hoping the icon would be the stinky variant[1], that would be so fun.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu