[joeduffy]

Pulumi Founder/CEO here.

The blog post is disingenuous. We tried many times to contribute upstream fixes to Terraform providers, but HashiCorp would never accept them. So we've had to maintain forks. They lost their OSS DNA a long time ago, and this move just puts the final nail in the coffin.

Thankfully over time, they already pushed responsibility for most Terraform providers back onto their partners, so I'm hopeful the ecosystem of providers can still stay vibrant and open.

We are deep believers in open source---heck my last project at Microsoft was to take .NET open source and cross-platform, our CTO helped found TypeScript, and Pulumi is an Apache open source project---it seems HashiCorp no longer is.

[fishpen0]

If they think we'll go crawling back to their 100x more expensive 6-7 figure Terraform Enterprise garbage just because we can't use spacelift anymore, then I'll show them the team of engineers we can hire for the same dollars to move the whole stack to pure pulumi or crossplane or the various CDKs

The bald faced disingenuous nature of this change here is wild. They can't compete at their pricing because their pricing is absolutely insane over what the market can bear and they refuse to accept it.

They are going out of their way to make it less expensive to stop using terraform altogether right as so many new options have entered the market

[fishnchips]

Spacelift co-founder here - please don’t panic. We will make sure you can continue to use Spacelift :)

[redeux]

>We tried many times to contribute upstream fixes to Terraform providers, but HashiCorp would never accept them. So we've had to maintain forks. They lost their OSS DNA a long time ago, and this move just puts the final nail in the coffin.

OSS doesn't mean that you have to accept any PRs that showed up in your repo, nor does it mean that you have to let a competitor steer your project simply because you're building in the open. Without further elaboration, what you're calling "upstream fixes" may have been considered "working as intended" at HashiCorp. As I'm sure you're well aware, every contribution has to be maintained and each increasing contribution comes with an additional burden. Responsible maintainers on large scale OSS projects must be selective about the code they let in.

[alexandre_m]

You have to acknowledge that all these OSS projects officially backed by a corporation don't want you to contribute certain features that are part of their enterprise offering. As soon as there's an "enterprise" tier, contributions are not only based on their merit, but also evaluated as a threat to their business model.

Sometimes it's not even obvious for external contributors, but there may be some small overlap with other paid features that are part of their product roadmap.

If a project on Github only has maintainers from the corporate side, you can be certain that they will ultimately drive the product for their own interest solely.

We should always pay close attention to the governance model of projects we depend on or that we wish to contribute to.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Sure, OSS doesn't mean you have to take all PRs, but if your claim is that others are just taking your code and not giving anything back, one of the alleged leeches showing up to talk about how they've tried to give back is very much pertinent.

[jsiepkes]

I'm not affiliated in any way with one of their competitors. Co-workers and I sent bug fix PR's to for example Vault. The last couple of years almost none of them were merged. These were small bug fixes, not (large) feature additions.

[jen20]

I’m sorry, but no. These are usually simple bugs like “forgot to a set a field during refresh”. They almost always correspond to one or more Terraform issues too, often ones that have been open for 4-5 years or have been “marked as stale” by some infuriating bot.

[netheril96]

Then don't complain about people not contributing to your projects. You reserve the right to reject my PR, and I reserve the right not to contribute any more.

[thayne]

I don't know if it is the case for the fixes pulumi sent, but for PRs I've made to terraform providers it can take a very long time for them to be looked at, and even longer to get merged. And I think it is mostly from nor having enough resources to approve and merge PRs. Although that could possibly be fixed by inviting developers outside the company to help with approval and merging, especially for providers.

[ilyt]

That's a lot of assumptions you're making here. From my little use of terraform it did had a bunch of issues that were purely a bug and laying unfixed for a long time.

[x1919]

For example, the widely used 'count' anti-pattern is still present, and no actions have been taken up to this day. This topic has persisted for 5 years. 5 YEARS!!! That's what triggered my decision to migrate to Pulumi.

[nailer]

> Without further elaboration, what you're calling "upstream fixes" may have been considered "working as intended" at HashiCorp.

Fair enough, let's see the PRs so we can judge for ourselves.

[geokon]

isn't the simpler explanation that they would in effect lose the ability to relicense the project and therefore lose control of their baby?

To not lose control you need to have people assign copyright which is generally a headache. I've only heard of the FSF doing that .. (not sure why this hasn't been streamlined electronically somehow)

[lifeisstillgood]

Can I ask where Pulumi gets revenue from? (Honest question first time I have heard of you, quick look seems to be a CentOS for hashicorp ?)

I love the ethos of open source and have spoken at and helped run conferences, and had the pleasure of being paid to develop it - but the productivity I had when paid ten hours a day to work on OSS compared to whenever I get a chance between work family and everything else, well, it's better for everyone to get paid and release code, than not get paid and not write the code.

I see these semi-commercial licenses as the equivalent of a legal "just don't take the piss".

Would be interested in your side of the question. How do we keep on developing the code as well as keeping it open?

[paulgb]

I am a paying Pulumi user. Their tool integrates with a cloud platform and we pay per resource managed by Pulumi.

Pulumi is one of several products where I like that it’s open source in case I need to move off their cloud, but hope that I don’t have to (Plausible is another).

[asmor]

I'm not sure if open sourcing .NET is the best bit to put on your resume when Microsoft has been sabotaging the developer ecosystem to keep VS relevant. [1]

Not that I don't appreciate the effort. I'm sure what has been achieved involved a fair share of convincing too.

[1]: https://isdotnetopen.com/

Being in the Apache Foundation gives me all the assurance I need alone, though.

[vmatsiiako]

I'm a huge fan of Pulumi. After HCP's license switch, I'm even more sure that Pulumi will be a clear winner over Terraform in the long term.

[Aeolun]

I really don’t think that was ever in doubt. You only need to use it for a very short time to find that the ergonomics are infinitely nicer than Terraform.

[hughesjj]

<3 pulumi

[nailer]

Just want to say I love Pulumi and think using actual code (rather than HCL config files) is the ideal realisation of the infra-as-code vision.

Pulumi being open source while Terraform is now proprietary cements that.

[justinclift]

Hadn't heard of Pulumi before.

It sounds like a Terraform alternative, but looking at the website it doesn't really convey if it's a Terraform fork or ground-up re-write, or something else?

[nailer]

Pulumi is infra as code. Not like Terraform define it - using the world's most hated config file format - but actual code - Python, TypeScript, etc.

[aatd86]

Open-source at big companies has a different financial structure.

It's not comparable.

[scarface_74]

Opposite anecdote, I know a few SAs at AWS who contribute to Terraform.

[evantbyrne]

It's definitely possible. I patched the AWS Terraform provider. It took three months to merge the two line bugfix though. Terraform's biggest weakness may be that it's too ambitious for its own good. 1.7k issues on Terraform itself and another 3.7k on the AWS provider. Ended up using boto3 to build out my CD platform.

[lolinder]

This anecdote is a lot less interesting, both because of the separation (you know some people vs they run a company with direct exposure) and lack of detail. I'm sure you do know some people who contribute, but you haven't given any details about their experience that would contradict OP's claim that contributing is hard.

[mst]

They appear to be aware that the ecosystem is important and providers have remained under an OSS license (at least as of this change).

So without defending the change they -have- made, that doesn't seem like where you're going to run into problems as a result of said change.

[melezhik]

However I wonder what’s pulumi future gonna be with that move ? So you guys now are going to maintain a transpiller for a closed product, huh ?

[anuraaga]

I am very much wondering this too. I've used Pulumi and like it a lot, it has a great UX in general. But the ecosystem for Terraform is orders of magnitude bigger, e.g. searching for help on Terraform is going to give a lot more results than Pulumi. As someone who can dig into details, this is not a big deal and can use Pulumi on personal projects but cannot in good faith recommend it for team projects only because of the ability to find resources is more important then.

I don't know if the license change actually means providers will not be able to work with Pulumi, but if it does, it seems risky to use Pulumi even for personal projects if newer provider versions (i.e., versions that work with newer products released by the cloud provider) will not work with Pulumi, it's a dead end. And that's not to mention the useful providers that aren't cloud and completely community developed that will not have the resources to maintain two codebases in any case (I'm thinking of Sendgrid).

I looked at terraform-sdk license - it still seems to be MPL. I think this means that all providers can continue to be open and work with both platforms, it will be important for Pulumi to clarify this to prevent the death spiral. Given some negative feedback towards the Hashicorp blog post from Pulumi employees on this thread, I am somewhat skeptical of this since if everything is fine, then complaining will otherwise have a negative effect, that us users have to assume that Hashicorp is actually stomping them out. And if it's the case, sorry but in good faith to everyone else that may need to work on infrastructure I make, I will have to be complicit in the stomping.

[thrixton]

Hey Joe,

Would this prevent you from integrating some modules such as AWS (I believe) from TF?

So much love for Pulumi from me, it’s an amazing product.

[_0c0t]

Pulumi is arguably the worst software I’ve ever used in my 15y career. I’d rather pay Hashicorp than use that dogshit.

On top of that, whether or not an OSS project accepts your PR means nothing about its quality or utility.

This change appears to have very little or nothing to do with most of us engineers and everything to do with companies wrapping and reselling. As far as I’m concerned it’s a good change.

Anyone who’s thinking about it. Stay away from Pulumi unless you’re okay moving from declarative IAC to some bullshit imperative Python or node constructors and for loops, and everything else that comes with writing OOP. I don’t care about the Hashicorp brand. I care about writing quality IAC and Pulumi is not it.