Open-Source

I installed OpenCore Legacy Patcher on my ancient MacBook. Updates to MacOS from Apple for that system had stopped some time ago and they were just doing the occasional security patch. I’d read about OpenCore before and thought it sounded interesting but until I got my new MacBook, I was a little hesitant to use it on something that was a daily driver. The installation process was as documented and went fairly smoothly.

The description of the BSL license as “faux-source” I ran across in this article about the saga of Terraform is perfect. It also speaks well about the the capability of OpenTofu as a replacement for Terraform. I haven’t done much with it recently, but early signs were very encouraging. It’s very unclear what IBM’s intention is with the aquisition of Terraform. Maybe they will even change the license back and remerge with OpenTofu?

Two months ago, I wrote about the LXD fork called Incus that was in the works. The first release of Incus is out and looks interesting. I haven’t installed it yet, but did give it a try online. It is very similar to LXD but has some nice changes. First, the simplification around instances rather than having separate containers and virtual machines is nice. It breaks backwards compatibility but makes things simpler going forward.

I did a little bit more testing with OpenTofu today. This time with LXD. There was a new alpha version of OpenTofu released to fix a bug so I installed that one to keep current. I didn’t encounter the bug although I did use the sensitive variable tag. An init, plan, apply and destroy loop worked flawlessly with the following simple LXD configuration: terraform { required_providers { lxd = { source = "terraform-lxd/lxd" } } } resource "lxd_instance" "tofu1" { name = "tofu1" image = "ubuntu:22.

I created a very simple project to test out the alpha release of OpenTofu using the Hetzner Cloud Provider. I figure many people are looking at the common providers like AWS and Azure, so I thought it would be interesting to check out something different. The first alpha release installed from a .deb file on Ubuntu 22.04 without issue. This release references the new registry amongst other things. I ran tofu init without any issues:

As I said I would do a few days back, I gave OpenTofu a try on one of my old Terraform projects. The TLDR; is that it worked without any changes to the existing scripts. The first step was downloading and building it on my ancient MacBook. The instructions to build the source code were easy to follow and it didn’t take too long to get it running. After that, it was a matter of getting an updated API key for Hetzner Cloud and creating a terraform.

The open-source fork of the now not open source Terraform called OpenTofu is getting close to operational readiness. It is being run by The Linux Foundation and has the backing of a number of companies and people. From what I can tell, the only thing missing right now is the registry for Terraform providers. I’m sure a new registry will be available soon and then it’s off to the races. I’m planning on revisiting a couple of the things I’ve done with Terraform over the past few years to see what, if any changes, are required to make them go.

In a continuation of recent changes to open source businesses, SUSE has decided to go back to being a private company. SUSE’s foray as a public company was certainly not profitable for investors who bought in at the IPO (thankfully, not me) but represents a good deal for current shareholders. My experience with SUSE has been very positive. I used it to deploy some SAP HANA databases about ten years ago and it was a very nice distro with some interesting configuration and management tools.

I’ve written about HashiCorp before. They have some very nice infrastructure-as-code (IAC) tools that have many users around the world. These tools used to be open source, but that has now changed. Instead of following the Mozilla Public License v2.0, they are moving to the Business Source License (BUSL). It’s sort of of open sourcish but has made plenty of people mad. I can see the point if you have contributed to a project and a company takes the code away and puts it into a less open license.

I took the Linux Foundation’s Fundamentals of Professional Open Source Management to get some ideas about how to professionalize the way we incorporate open source into our products at work. Since we sell software to customers, we need to make sure that we understand the ins and outs of the various licenses and are doing all the right things. I’m pretty sure we are but having a bit of a policy around how open source is selected and used would be a good idea.