
When HashiCorp announced it was changing its Terraform license in August, it set off a firestorm in the open source community, and actually represented an existential threat to startups that were built on top of the popular open source project. The community went into action and within weeks they had written a manifesto, and soon after that launched an official fork called OpenTF.
Today, that group went a step further when the Linux Foundation announced OpenTofu, the official name for the Terraform fork, which will live forever under the auspices of the foundation as an open source project. At the same time, the project announced it would be applying for entry into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
“OpenTofu is an open and community-driven response to Terraform’s recently announced license change from a Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPLv2) to a Business Source License v1.1 providing everyone with a reliable, open source alternative under a neutral governance model,” the foundation said in a statement.
The name is deliberately playful says Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman from the OpenTofu founding team, who is also co-founder of Gruntwork. “I’m glad your reaction was to laugh. That’s a good thing. We’re trying to keep things a little more humorous,” Brikman told TechCrunch, but the group is dead serious when it comes to building an open fork.
Brikman said HashiCorp left the splinter group with little choice but to launch the fork: “HashiCorp, give them full credit, did an incredible job getting the project to where it is today. But core building blocks like Terraform have to always be open source. That’s just a fundamental belief that all of us have — and it was shocking when the license was changed to a non-open source license,” he said.
Terraform gives developers the ability to treat infrastructure as code and describe how the application and the infrastructure work together, saving oodles of time previously spent coding.
In addition to Gruntwork, the other members of the founding group include Harness Labs, Scalr, Env0 and Spacelift, all companies that rely on the open source version of Terraform as a basic building block of their companies. Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and CEO of Harness, says the founding companies are doing what they need to do to ensure the project stayed open.