I really appreciate that, and I do think it's right of you to at least make the attempt.
That being said, I don't expect this attempt to work and I fully believe that a fork is going to be inevitable. I also think a fork is an amazing opportunity to standardize the language and prioritize the features developers want.
It isn't just about the license, but the way that Hashicorp has maintained the Terraform project. The github insights show that they don't have nearly as many people working on it as I would expect, and most of them are split into also working on Terraform Cloud. At the same time they don't work with the community that well- there are open issues and pull requests that just get ignored as Hashicorp clearly doesn't see value in open source contributors. This isn't just a Terraform issue either- my company had to move off of nomad due to the lack of development and support (as well as broken features).
I have strong concerns about the future of these projects in general beyond just the licensing. An open foundation that had multiple companies involved would by definition need to find a way for those people to collaborate together, and once they do that it makes it easier for them to invite community collaboration. So while I do appreciate that it is a drastic step, I think it's one that would also be far better for the ecosystem and project as a whole.
That said, maybe this is the wake up call hashicorp needs to fix these problems. If you provide five FTEs that basically doubles the size of their Terraform development team (they have more people working on it than five, but those people are split into other projects), and once they start working with other groups maybe they'll work with the community more as well. I'm not holding my breath though.
Smells like the end of Chef. Management doesn't understand how much it takes to maintain the open source project and is just pouring resources into sales and marketing and products that they can charge for, and don't see how that erodes goodwill and the technological foundation of the company.
I also saw that parallel with Chef. I think its the story of all VC funded software that attempts to be "Open Source". For them, Open Source means "You can read the source code, and potentially fix a bug", for us, it means community, transparency, and fixing bugs beyond those your paying customer has.
I looked at github /chef/chef and github /inspec/inspec and its the same as it was shortly after I left. The only changes are from the one person who carried over after the sale to Progress, and the contracting team out of India, with dozens are unanswered queries and pull requests from the community.
What really ruffles my feathers was when they had us define oss-practices (https://github.com/chef/chef-oss-practices), clearly nobody outside our small team read (or understood) those words and goals. It feels like it was work to make us look better in OSS in order to bolster the company sale.
There was a whole lot of community window dressing going on. I still wonder if they weren't trying to ship maintenance of the open source code off onto the community thinking that if all that worked appeared (or thinking that it was actually going on--believing their own bullshit about how involved the community was) that they could just leach that work.
There's probably some manager at Hashi right now trying to argue that they should offload TF maintenance entirely onto the community and they should pivot to hosting services and consulting and making money off of all that free work.
chef said, did and tried some really dumb stuff and lots of it failed for obvious reasons, it's like docker took a chunk of their playbook and their business went the same way.
That being said, I don't expect this attempt to work and I fully believe that a fork is going to be inevitable. I also think a fork is an amazing opportunity to standardize the language and prioritize the features developers want.
It isn't just about the license, but the way that Hashicorp has maintained the Terraform project. The github insights show that they don't have nearly as many people working on it as I would expect, and most of them are split into also working on Terraform Cloud. At the same time they don't work with the community that well- there are open issues and pull requests that just get ignored as Hashicorp clearly doesn't see value in open source contributors. This isn't just a Terraform issue either- my company had to move off of nomad due to the lack of development and support (as well as broken features).
I have strong concerns about the future of these projects in general beyond just the licensing. An open foundation that had multiple companies involved would by definition need to find a way for those people to collaborate together, and once they do that it makes it easier for them to invite community collaboration. So while I do appreciate that it is a drastic step, I think it's one that would also be far better for the ecosystem and project as a whole.
That said, maybe this is the wake up call hashicorp needs to fix these problems. If you provide five FTEs that basically doubles the size of their Terraform development team (they have more people working on it than five, but those people are split into other projects), and once they start working with other groups maybe they'll work with the community more as well. I'm not holding my breath though.