The name OpenTofu may sound silly
Someone should make a open source project about how to give good names to open source projects.
Seriously. Way too many open source projects have bad names. In jokes, oh so clever world plays, programmer humor recursive names and just silly sounding or impossible to pronounce stuff everywhere.
Is Hashicorp trying to follow Unity’s footsteps? I’m just hoping they won’t retroactively change their licenses.
Unity was never open source, right? Different situation.
More like mongodb or elasticsearch
Not nearly as extreme. I can understand the comparison but it’s not even close to the egregiousness (that’s a word, right?) of unity
They can’t retroactively change the license, doubly so if it’s an open-source license, as that would break the contractual agreement made with existing users when they accepted the license terms.
And if the previous license used allows for redistribution, then the existing users are still allowed to redistribute the software under the previous terms, which makes the previous license still valid for new users since they don’t have to acquire the software from the original source and are bound to the license it originally came with.
It’s a legal can of worms you don’t want to open.
Good.
EDIT: Informative comments below have convinced me that the license change is worth worrying about, and this fork is worth supporting.
The new license does not really affect the average person. Only companies offering terraform as a hosted service.
Funny to be reading this in an open source community. For one, the fork’s license is open source while Terraform’s is not. The impact is mostly on businesses, but open source has always been for everyone - including business.
Furthermore, Terraform’s new license is subject to interpretation and dynamic. It’s so hazy and unclear that they created an FAQ website which is essentially a binding addendum to the license that can be updated anytime as Hashicorp pleases. Is your business competing with Hashicorp? Who knows, only Hashicorp can decide that.
Edit: Clarified phrasing
I like open source because of how it affects ordinary individuals. I am not very concerned for businesses. In fact I’d prefer that businesses profitting from free software must profit share with the creators. It would ensure the longevity of the project.
What you’re describing is business source, not open source. Hashicorp chose to use open source and thus allow other companies to compete. Nobody forced them to, they could’ve just kept Terraform as closed or business source from the beginning. There’s nothing wrong with doing so, only if you pull a bait and switch like Hashicorp did does it become a problem.
The project controlled by only one entity can affect users in the future. Moving forward Hashicorp could do anything with the code or licensing and nobody could do anything about it. It is good that something is happening now, when there is still the chance to do it.
There are Alot of terraform users that either use a third party tool that the BSL would make legally impossible or benefit from features like locally encrypted state won’t get merged by hashicorp
Love to see this and hate to see it at the same time.
I wonder how long interoperability will last or if they will immediately start forging a new path.
All the functionality is in the providers, so breaking compatibility would be an awful idea
I kinda don’t care. The providers do all of the work anyway and, I think more importantly, terraform still feels like transitional tech. I might use it to stand up an initial working cluster but, in the long run and if given the choice, I’d want to use something closer to Crossplane for managing infrastructure.
Terraform is still quite manual and doesn’t mandate consistency… You have to build automation around it and because drift is so easy it results in a system that can’t just be fully automated… You always have to check to see if changing a simple resource tag is going to revert a manual IAM permissions change that was made to a service account 3 weeks ago…
I’ve been using terraform almost daily for years but I wouldn’t be sad if it stopped existing.
Why tho? I read the justification and the new license. Seems pretty okay to me. This is just going to fragment the community. So worse for everyone
There are a number of companies that would be affected by the license change, and they are the largest driving force behind the fork. Hashicorp’s managed option just really sucks. There might be fragmentation, but I expect most people to switch to the project with more engineers, Linux foundation backing, and an actually open source license.
