OpenTofu Joins CNCF: New Home for Open Source IaC Project
It’s not easy running an open source non-profit group. Just ask anyone who’s tried. So it should come as no surprise that the OpenTofu community has voted to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
For those who are new to the OpenTofu saga, the product, an open source Infrastructure as Code (IaC), was born as a community-driven fork of Terraform, after HashiCorp, Terraform’s founder, switched from the Mozilla open source Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the source available Business Source License (BSL) v1.1. No sooner had OpenTofu started than the Linux Foundation adopted the newborn project.
Meanwhile, Back at HashiCorp…
OpenTofu quickly established itself as a stable, production-ready fork, committed to open governance and community stewardship. Since then, IBM acquired HashiCorp, but Terraform remains under the BSL. There had been some talk of Terraform returning to its open source roots, but nothing has come of it.
Thus, the OpenTofu community decided to find a permanent home, and the CNCF quickly emerged as a popular option. However, the CNCF required member projects to use the Apache License 2.0, not the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This obstacle was overcome, though, when the CNCF’s Governing Board approved an exception to its intellectual property policy, allowing OpenTofu to use the MPL 2.0 license.
The OpenTofu crew appears to be pleased with this move. As Omry Hay, env zero CTO and co-founder of OpenTofu, wrote, “As one of the founding members, I can’t help but feel a bit like a proud parent. What initially started as a necessity has grown into an amazing collaboration, with individuals, organizations, peers, and even competitors uniting under a common mission: to secure the open source future of Terraform.”
With the endorsement of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee, the CNCF has accepted OpenTofu as a sandbox project. It’s anticipated that it will swiftly progress through the foundation’s maturity levels. After all, it only took OpenTofu four months from announcing the fork to shipping the first updated, production-ready version of the program, OpenTofu 1.6.
While Terraform remains the clear leader of dedicated IaC tools with a 33.31% market share according to business intelligence firm 6Sense, IaC integration company Spacelift’s VP of engineering, Wojciech Barczynski, believes “2025 will be the year of OpenTofu” based on its features and growing popularity. Of course, he is also a member of the OpenTofu Technical Steering Committee, but OpenTofu’s GitHub numbers do show that it has numerous supporters.
Looking ahead, with a steering committee representing a cross-section of industry players, including env zero, Gruntwork, Harness, Spacelift, and Scalr, and CNCF support, OpenTofu’s direction is firmly in the hands of its open source users and contributors. Users who want a reliable, vendor-neutral, open source program that supports the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) should also be pleased.
How well this will all turn out, however, depends in part on issues beyond OpenTofu’s control. If IBM/Red Hat is successful with integrating Terraform into its hybrid cloud offerings, OpenTofu will face an uphill battle.
