openTF was born out of the need to keep Terraform as open source
A few days ago the news of the creation of the OpenTF organization, which will develop a bifurcation of configuration management platform and will automate infrastructure maintenance Terraform.
For those who don't know about Terraform, you should know that this is a powerful infrastructure-as-code software tool, offered by HashiCorp. Its use is based on connecting with different infrastructure hosts and achieving complex management scenarios and compliance in multiple clouds.
Terraform changes license from MPL to BSL
It is mentioned that the reason for the creation of the organization, OpenTF, it is because HashiCorp announced that it will change the license of all its major products, including Terraform, to a Business Source License (BSL).
In an attempt to keep Terraform open source, we released the OpenTF manifest and the response from the community was huge. More than 100 companies, 10 projects, and 400 people committed their time and resources to keep Terraform open source.
The authors of the initiative they published a manifesto in which, to avoid fragmentation of the community, they were asking HashiCorp to reconsider its decision and return Terraform to an open license. HashiCorp has not responded to the proposal in any way and has now publicly announced the creation of a fork.
The purpose of the fork is to keep Terraform open source, andBecause the license change to BSL 1.1 restricts the use of code in cloud systems that compete with HashiCorp's products and services. The goal of the OpenTF project is to preserve the completely open nature of the Terraform platform and also facilitate the participation of external companies and enthusiasts in the development and decision making.
Since no rollback has been made and no intention to do so has been communicated, we are proud to announce that we have created a fork of Terraform called OpenTF. Many engineers from various companies, sometimes even from competing companies, have been working together for the last week to make this possible. It's been an amazing experience, really!
It is planned to transfer development under the auspices of the Linux Foundation for further development of the platform on the neutral site of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with the participation of companies and enthusiasts interested in the project. Joining the Linux Foundation will ensure that the open nature of the platform is maintained and that the project is protected from policy changes by individual companies.
In the OpenTF announcement it is mentioned that, All the necessary documents are already available to join the project to the Linux Foundation, In addition, they announced their support for the new organization and their intention to participate in the development of the fork companies, projects and individual developers.
The companies that have joined the OpenTF initiative have allocated resources equivalent to the work of 14 full-time engineers to develop the fork. For comparison, the last two years at HashiCorp, the platform was accompanied by only 5 engineers.
In addition to this, it is mentioned that the fork code is expected to be placed in the repository in 1-2 weeks (expected no later than the second week of September) after the renaming and cleanup work is finished. documentation.
After that, they mention that once everything is ready, work will begin on the first version of OpenTF which will be used as a transparent replacement for Terraform, which will be compatible with all Terraform providers and modules.
Also worth mentioning, the post shares that the fork will be based on the following basic principles for further development of OpenTF:
- Development as an open source project under the free MPLv2 license.
- Community involvement in project management, community acceptance of changes, an open process to review changes, and develop innovations through public comment on RFCs.
- Make decisions to include fixes and new features based on the benefit to the community rather than individual vendors.
- The use of a modular structure that is convenient for programmers and contributes to the development of a new ecosystem of tools and components for integration.
- Preservation of compatibility with previous versions.
Finally if you are iInterested in learning more about it, you can check the details in the following link