undefined | Better HN

0 pointsquacker2y ago0 comments

> You say this as if it's a one-way street, but it ain't. Pulumi and Hashicorp profit from there being an ecosystem of providers compatible with both and therefore useful to both sets of customers.

This is idealism.

The reality is Pulumi's providers have no value for Terraform, which already built and curated its own ecosystem after years of time and effort. Then, Pulumi can spin up a directly competing product in a fraction of the time by reusing all of that work. So I understand the motivation for the license change.

Circling back to your original comment which spawned this thread:

> Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp?

The answer is unequivocally "yes". Pulumi has. And Pulumi can continue to do so, apparently. Terraform providers continue to be MPL-licensed.

Another example I learned of was IBM Cloud Secrets Manager, which is basically reselling Vault: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/secrets-manager

With IBM Cloud® Secrets Manager, you can create secrets dynamically and lease them to applications while you control access from a single location. Built on open source HashiCorp Vault, Secrets Manager helps you get the data isolation of a dedicated environment with the benefits of a public cloud.

0 comments

yellowapple2y ago

> This is idealism.

No, it's realism. The only one to blame for Hashicorp not adequately capitalizing on the two-way street that is multiple FOSS (well, formerly, in one case) IaC systems being compatible with one another... is Hashicorp. Instead of recognizing a case where "open source" is mutually beneficial, they'd rather take their ball and go home - and that's their right, but it ain't beyond criticism.

> The reality is Pulumi's providers have no value for Terraform, which already built and curated its own ecosystem after years of time and effort

The reality is that Hashicorp adopted Pulumi's strategy of autogenerating provider resources from API catalogs rather than maintaining handwritten bindings (i.e. what differentiates Pulumi's "native" v. "classic" providers). So yes, Pulumi's providers clearly have value. Hell, they can continue to have value even after Hashicorp's BUSL shenanigans thanks to Apache 2.0 being permissive.

> The answer is unequivocally "yes". Pulumi has.

The answer is hardly "unequivocal", per above and per the previous comments. Calling a collection of third-party-developed API shims a "product" is itself a massive stretch of the word, and calling bidirectional / mutually beneficial contribution to that collection "competition" is itself a massive stretch of the word.

IBM Cloud Secrets Manager is much better evidence in support of an unequivocal "yes" (though like most non-mainframe IBM-branded products these days I'd question whether or not it counts as "of any significance").