How OpenTofu Happened — and What’s Next?
How did the open source community converge in August 2023 to create an open source alternative to Terraform, the previously open source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) software owned by HashiCorp?
In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Ohad Maislish, co-founder and CEO of env0, an IaC automation company, told TNS Host Chris Pirillo about what happened when HashiCorp (now owned by IBM), decided last year to adopt the more restrictive Business Source License for its widely used product Terraform.
Maislish and others forked Terraform and created a new open source alternative, eventually called OpenTofu, which it donated to The Linux Foundation. The battle over Terraform and OpenTofu not only directly affected Terraform users, but also raised alarms about the dangers of being dependent on an open source tool whose licensing can change without warning.
A few hours after HashiCorp changed the Terraform license, “I bought the domain opentf.org,” Maislish said. “And I still have this email as a nice memory from that time [when] we immediately reacted and started working under the opentf.org domain.”
With OpenTofu, the name the project creators settled on after OpenTF, “There is no option of changing the license, because the license belongs — all the assets belong — to the Linux Foundation,” Maislish said.
“What I’m telling everybody from what I’ve learned in the past year is you need to differentiate between open source backed by a vendor versus open source backed by a foundation. Because open source backed by a vendor, it means it’s open source today, it could not be open source tomorrow. Open source backed by foundations, it’s open source today and will be tomorrow.”
The Birth of OpenTofu
Though the fork of Terraform got the attention of the software industry, it wasn’t the first move made to create an open source alternative, Maislish told Pirillo.
“The first thing we did before writing any line of code was to write a document — a manifest — and share that manifest publicly and got about 1,000 pledges, got about 30,000, 35,000 GitHub stars on this manifest. And then we called the leadership of HashiCorp to consider reverting this change specifically for Terraform.”
He added, “We suggested that this is the natural thing to do because they often work with so many other open source projects that will be affected. And we thought that this would kill the Terraform ecosystem.”
When the organizers didn’t get any response from HashiCorp, he said, they worked with the Linux Foundation to fork Terraform and build what became OpenTofu.
HashiCorp accused the OpenTofu project of stealing its intellectual property; OpenTofu denied the charges of code theft, and the project’s maintainers have since suggested that it could be reconciled to a new, open source version of Terraform if IBM is willing.
Since OpenTofu was launched, it’s been adopted by a number of organizations, Maislish said, pointing specifically to Oracle. In May, Oracle rolled out its EBS Cloud Manager 24.1.1.1, which works with OpenTofu rather than Terraform.
Going forward, the OpenTofu community is paying attention to what users want, he said. “We have a GitHub page of all of the issues, and you can upvote. And that’s our priority. We don’t talk to any sales reps. We just see what the community wants, and it’s done.”
Watch the full episode to learn more about OpenTofu.
