Licensing decision aside, I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for Hashicorp here. I think this is different than other scenarios where big MSP’s sell tools based 99% or open source software.
This service will largely be used for deployments on Google Cloud, for which Google invests a lot of development effort in maintaining their own provider. It’s not like there’s not already significant contribution from Google to the code base.
This isn’t really a service. All it does is deploy an infrastructure template into your GCP project. It won’t largely be for deployments on Google Cloud. It’s for automating Terraform, and whatever providers the customer wants to use.
You, the customer, pay for everything deployed, and Google just pre-connects it to all their services for monitoring and maintenance. It would be like if Route53 on AWS was free, but it deployed a VM in your account, added gateways and nats, opened ports, etc., so that it all ran on discrete infrastructure for just you and you got charged for everything and had to do all the scaling.
If you’ve used their Apache Airflow product (Cloud Composer), it’s basically the same thing. With Cloud Composer, they are setting up an Airflow node and cluster on your behalf, in your account, that you pay for, and connecting it to their services.
This is no different than going to a consulting company and asking them to setup and maintain a Terraform automation platform in your account., which Hashicorp said was allowed. Google isn’t reselling it as a product. They’re setting it up on their platform on your behalf and giving it to you.
And there’s no reason you couldn’t switch it out to OpenTF.
They may well do, but to be honest my fundamental point extends beyond just Google. Hashicorp benefits extensively from third parties maintaining their own providers.
This service will largely be used for deployments on Google Cloud, for which Google invests a lot of development effort in maintaining their own provider. It’s not like there’s not already significant contribution from Google to the code base.