September 21, 2023

Terraform is no longer open source. Is OpenTofu the successor? - OpenObservability Talks S4E04

1 hour 9 minutes

Terraform is no longer open source. This is the news we got last month (August 2023), when HashiCorp announced its decision to relicense its open source tools, including Terraform, Vault, Packer, Consul, Vagrant and others, into Business Source License 1.1.

The community, led by active Terraform-based vendors, gathered up to create a fork of Terraform to keep it open. The result is OpenTofu (originally called OpenTF), whose manifesto already has tens of thousands of stars on GitHub, less than a month out. Only a month old, engineers are hard at work to establish the first release of OpenTofu, as well as its foundational backbone.

In this month’s episode I covered these significant events that shake our industry and the DevOps world. I was joined by Omry Hay, co-founder and CTO of env0. env0 provides an automation solution based on Terraform, and is one of the creators of OpenTofu and a member of the project’s steering committee. Omry also shared OpenTofu’s mission and current status, as well as exciting updates, hot off Open Source Summit Europe conference taking place these days, in which OpenTofu has officially joined The Linux Foundation.

Omry has been a software engineer and engineering manager for the last 16 years, working at companies like eToro, Fiverr and Proofpoint. As CTO of env0, he leads the R&D and Product departments.

The episode was live-streamed on 18 September 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QdUs9VKq5g

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Show Notes:

00:00 - show intro

00:56 - episode and guest intro

02:45 - HashiCorp’s relicensing announcement

04:58 - what the relicensing means for users

14:50 - implications on the Terraform ecosystem

24:55 - HCL language for IaC

28:36 - what does the new license mean?

32:13 - Terms of service changed for Terraform Registry

36:08 - forking Terraform and starting OpenTF/OpenTofu

41:08 - how many engineers work on OpenTofu

42:18 - joining the Linux Foundation and renaming OpenTofu

48.50 - OpenTofu release and Terraform compatibility

56:54 - roadmap for OpenTofu

59:00 - how to get touch with the community and Omry

64.30 - The OSI Approved Licenses database is available

65:28 - Red Hat changed the CentOS release process

Resources:

HashiCorp relicensing announcement: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-licenseOpenTofu project: https://opentofu.org/ The Linux Foundation announces OpenTofu: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/announcing-opentofu Red Hat changed the CentOS release process: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-streamCNCF’s guidelines for using source-available dependencies in its OSS projects: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/source-available-recommendations.md#recommendations checklist for safely using and choosing open source tools: https://medium.com/@horovits/when-your-open-source-turns-to-the-dark-side-331d83f182c

Socials:

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YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠

Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

Omry Hay

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/omryhay

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omryhay/

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By Dotan Horovits

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