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.
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.
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
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.
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
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