HACKER Q&A
📣 jimkoen

Terraform is getting a FOSS fork, what about other HashiCorp tools?


The recent license change from MPL to a non-FOSS license was discussed to great extend on HN over the past week [0]. As a result, some companies with infrastructure/devops focused products announced that they plan to creating a FOSS fork of Terraform, as it is arguably the most popular tool in HashiCorps toolshed. [1]

But I was wondering if anyone was interested in or is planning to fork some of the remaining tools in the HC stack. I'm personally interested in keeping Packer going, as it currently seems to be the only solution that can create what HC calls "golden images" in an user friendly way. An alternative to Packer would be shoehorning something with Ansible, which I think would be rather tedious.

I was hoping that there maybe was some ongoing development already, but of which the greater HN community wasn't aware of, so maybe this post could be used to spread some awareness.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37133054


  👤 remram Accepted Answer ✓
Images created by Packer are not affected by the change of license, and I don't know if many products are built on the Packer code. Re-doing the work in a separate form just to have it open source might not be very worthwhile.

There's no need of a fork to "keep Packer going" as you put it. HashiCorp is continuing development, under a different license, but one that probably still works for everyone.