Znafon

"Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day.

My idea was to take this code and spruce it up for Uber’s use case."

"My first reaction was to publish the code on Github."

I’m very surprised by this, isn’t the code property of Box, or Uber? The author does not mention their authorisation before releasing it under MIT license.

The AGPL says "including scripts to control those activities" but if I understand what you are saying properly it means that the text of the AGPL is overreaching and some parts of it wouldn't be applicable?

Would the details depend on the country? Like it might be one thing under US law, and another in another country?

The AGPL defines "Corresponding Source" as "all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities".

Then in section 13 it says that "your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge".

Isn't "scripts to control those activities quite vague? Under those terms wouldn't AWS Proton, IBM Schematics, Env0, Digger, Spacelift, etc. be required to open-source a very large part of their product as well?

It's not just big tech that hates AGPL. If Terraform was under AGPL a lot of companies might have to release their source code as AGPL too because of its virality. Where it stops is not exactly clear from the license.

You could modify it easily, for example the user could register an additional function to the mapping. That would not be as easy to do with a module and getattr().

You can also list the registered function with math_exprs.keys() and that might not be as easy with a module either.

Oh yeah, that’s right! Thanks for the correction

I'm not sure

    print(firstname, lastname)

for example is more readable than

    print((firstname, lastname))

especially since I would then have to write

    print((surname,))

to just print a single string.

Variadic functions are rather classic, I think Go, Rust, C and JavaScript also have them.

I think it is consistent, it works a bit like filtering an element from a mathematical set.

Given a set of sheeps, let x be the five-legged sheep is inconsistent because we know neither the existence or uniqueness of shuch sheep, so it raises an exception.

Given a set of sheeps, let x be the subset of five legged sheeps is the empty set because there is no such sheep.

but this may also just be because I internalised Python's behavior.

Some language have a specific value to denote the first thing, for example:

   ["a", "b", "c"][4]

gives `undefined` in JavaScript but it differs from `null` which would be the equivalent to `None` in Python (and I don't think Python has such concept).

It is used when the number of argument can vary, like:

    def sum(*args: int) -> int:
        if len(args) == 0:
            return 0
        return args[0] + sum(*args[1:])

spacectl, vcs-agent and terraform-provider-spacelift are only useful with your proprietary product. prometheus-exporter is a very small exporter to monitor your proprietary product and has no utility beyond that.

I'm not sure what spcontext does because it has no documentation but I'm sure I could read the 10 commits to find out. The only none trivial project in the list is celplate which actually looks nice, but even there most of its complexity is in cel-spec.

> Whenever there's an opportunity to sponsor a project on which we heavily rely, we do that.

Come on, on Spacelift GitHub profile there is one project sponsored, and only since August 24!

> we don't maintain any major open source projects as a company

So you never had to handle project management of large open-source supports, community support, doing code reviews every day and handling feature requests from the community?

Yes, HashiCorp has been slow to respond to PRs and did not always commmunicate clearly, but so does many large open-source project like PostgreSQL, Python, Linux, etc. Managing a large open-source project takes more time than clicking on the merge button on GitHub. Users don't magically come fix all the bugs in the software, and develop complex new features.

HashiCorp did contribute a lot, and there is still a lot to learn from their projects, there is Raft, the autopilot, various library that are used a lot in the Go ecosystem, including go-plugin, a programming language with its specific type system and plenty more. After all, the change of license is making noises because we their tools defines part fo the DevOps world and we all use them a lot.

I wish HashiCorp would have kept using the MIT license, but using the BUSL is still miles ahead better than companies that are completely closed source.

From the outside perspective it looks like you support Free Software as in Free Beer more than in Free Speech. You are supportive when others are actually maintaining the projects for you, and you just want them to merge your contributions quickly. It is a very efficient way to externalize some of your costs, but you only step forward to actually to help manage them when your bottom line is threatened.

That's ok, it looks like you love money more than open-source ideas. That's perfectly fine but don't pretend otherwise.

Some others companies that signed the pledge have actually been maintaining open-source projects and have a leg to stand on. Spacelift loves having the high moral ground and the extra publicity.

Release the core of your product as open-source, like HashiCorp did for 9 years, and it will change my mind.

So the software from your company is fully closed-source, isn't it?

The employes can do open-source on Friday but no part of Spacelift is actually open-source?

This is a very non-charitable read of the history here.

Also, none of the companies that pledge FTE support to OpenTF are open-source.