Earlier this month, HashiCorp announced it would be switching the license for all of its products to a Business Source License (BSL), changing from the Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) that they were originally under. Its products include the infrastructure-as-code service Terraform, the images-as-code solution Packer, and the identity-based security solution Vault.
In response to this change, the Terraform community came together to form OpenTF, which published the OpenTF Manifesto. They claim that since the BSL is not an open-source license, “this change threatens the entire community and ecosystem that’s built up around Terraform over the last 9 years.”
OpenTF then on Friday announced it was creating its own fork of Terraform called OpenTF that would remain open source, community-driven, impartial, layered and modular, and backwards-compatible.
The community already has over 100 companies and 400 individuals working on it, and the GitHub repository already has 4.6k stars at the time of writing.
What has been accomplished so far includes nearly finishing the rename to OpenTF across the repository, selecting initial steering committee members, performing initial adjustments to community documents, and introducing CI/CD pipelines and testing harnesses. Project status can be tracked here.
HashiCorp said of the reasoning behind the licensing change: “We strongly believe in the value of openly sharing source code and enabling practitioners to solve their problems, building communities, and creating transparency. HashiCorp provides feature-rich products to the community for free, and that development is made possible by our commercial customers who partner with us. By shifting to this license, HashiCorp can better manage commercial uses of our source code and continue to invest in our thriving community of practitioners, many of whom are contributors, in a manner that will not impede their work.”
