OpenTofu will become the reference infrastructure as a code solution.
Some days ago I shared the news here on the blog of the birth of OpenTF, a fork of Terraform, emerging before him announced HashiCorp's licensing change of all its core products, including Terraform, to the Business Source License (BSL).
And now several days later, The project and infrastructure was renamed OpenTF to OpenTofu, to eliminate intersections with the Terraform project and Hashicorp trademarks.
The license change is explained by the desire to maintain financing for their developments in the face of the inability of classic licensing models to resist the parasitism of companies using ready-made open source codes from HashiCorp developments to create their own commercial cloud products without participating in joint development.
It is mentioned that The reason for the change is due to the decision to replace the abbreviation “tf” with “Tofu”, since the “tf” combination is already used in Terraform file extensions, in code variables and functions, as well as in the names of TFC Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise Products.
Given that OpenTofu is positioned as a product for companies, the creators of the fork decided to eliminate all potential risks associated with possible legal claims for violation of Hashicorp's trademarks and intellectual property.
Today, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of OpenTofu, an open source alternative to the widely used Terraform infrastructure as a code provisioning tool. OpenTofu, formerly called OpenTF, is an open, community-driven response to Terraform's recently announced license change from a Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPLv2) to a Commercial Source License v1.1, giving everyone a Reliable open source alternative under a neutral governance model.
While Terraform has been instrumental in simplifying infrastructure management in cloud environments, recent licensing changes have raised concerns within the open source community. OpenTofu is an open source successor to Terraform under the MPLv2 license that will be community-driven, unbiased, layered and modular, and backward compatible.
At the same time, It was announced that OpenTofu was officially accepted into the Linux Foundation project list. Developing a neutral-site fork under the auspices of the Linux Foundation will ensure that the open nature of the platform is maintained, protect the project from changes to individual company policies, and facilitate third-party participation.
Currently, companies that have joined the OpenTofu initiative have allocated resources equivalent to 18 full-time engineers over the next 5 years to develop the fork (for comparison, HashiCorp has been maintaining Terraform for the last two years with 5 engineers ).
“The launch of OpenTofu marks a collective commitment to foster truly open collaboration and innovation in the infrastructure as code space,” said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. "OpenTofu's dedication to open source principles underscores our shared vision of providing accessible, trusted tools that empower the technology community."
In addition to that, also some basic principles are mentioned For further development of OpenTofu:
- Development as an open project under a free MPLv2 license.
- Community involvement in project management, community acceptance of changes, an open review process for changes, and development of innovations through public discussion of RFCs.
- Making decisions to include fixes and new features based on the benefit to the community and not individual vendors.
- Use of a modular structure that is convenient for programmers and promotes the development of a new ecosystem of tools and components for integration.
- Maintains backward compatibility and allows OpenTofu to be used as a transparent replacement for Terraform, compatible with all Terraform providers and modules.
finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link