OpenTofu, the open source Terraform fork, has hit general availability (GA) some four months after launch.
The eternal struggle between open source and proprietary software was laid bare on numerous occasions last year, perhaps most notably when HashiCorp switched popular “infrastructure as code” tool Terraform from a “copyleft” open source license to the source-available Business Source License (BSL).
The reason, HashiCorp explained, was that certain vendors were building businesses off the back of Terraform without contributing anything meaningful back to the project. The license change placed greater restrictions on how companies can commercialize Terraform, especially where a competing product might be involved.
More or less as expected, a vendor-led faction subsequently forked the original Terraform project and went it alone with OpenTF, eventually rebranded as OpenTofu and placed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, with support from big-name companies including GitLab, Oracle and CloudFlare.
As with any fledgling fork, OpenTofu wasn’t quite ready for prime time in its initial embryonic form, with the core developers — more than five dozen, according to the Linux Foundation — spending the past four months knocking the project into shape. With OpenTofu now hitting general availability, this means that the project is deemed ready for production use cases.
“I believe it’s important for bedrock tooling like this to be open-source, with the ecosystem being able to build around it,” said OpenTofu’s interim technical lead Kuba Martin, in a press release. “It took us a while to get OpenTofu to the current, stable state, but now people can actually start moving their workloads to it.”
