How OpenTofu Happened — and What’s Next?

The New Stack Podcast

In August 2023, the open source community rallied to create OpenTofu, an alternative to Terraform, after HashiCorp, now owned by IBM, adopted a restrictive Business Source License for Terraform. Ohad Maislish, co-founder and CEO of env0, explained on The New Stack Makers how this move sparked the initiative. A few hours after HashiCorp's license change, Maislish secured the domain opentf.org and began developing the new project, eventually named OpenTofu, which was donated to The Linux Foundation to ensure its license couldn't be altered.

Maislish highlighted the importance of distinguishing between vendor-backed and foundation-backed open source projects to avoid sudden licensing changes. Before coding, the community created a manifesto, gathering significant support and pledges, but received no response from HashiCorp. Consequently, they proceeded with the fork and development of OpenTofu. Despite accusations of intellectual property theft from HashiCorp, OpenTofu gained traction and was adopted by organizations like Oracle. The community continues to prioritize user feedback through GitHub.

Learn more from The New Stack about OpenTofu:

OpenTofu vs. HashiCorp Takes Center Stage at Open Source Summit

OpenTofu Amiable to a Terraform Reconciliation

OpenTofu 1.6 General Availability: Open Source Infrastructure as Code

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