OpenTF forks Terraform, insists HashiCorp is the splinter group

Two weeks after HashiCorp modified the phrases beneath which its Terraform software program is licensed, customers of the infrastructure automation venture – company rivals amongst them – have created a fork of the Terraform code.

HashiCorp’s announcement this month it could swap from the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to the Business Source License v1.1 (BSL) prompted an open supply group group calling itself OpenTF to difficulty a manifesto a number of days later, calling for the restoration of Terraform’s open supply license.

HashiCorp, which went public in late 2021, didn’t revisit its licensing makeover, and so the Terraform code has been, or is about to be, forked.

“Since no reversal has been done, and no intent to do one has been communicated, we’re proud to announce that we have created a fork of Terraform called OpenTF,” the group stated on Friday. “Many engineers across a number of companies, sometimes even competing companies, have been working together over the last week to make this possible.”

We did not do it, you probably did

“Our view is that we’re actually not the fork because we’re just changing the name but it’s the same project under the same license,” Sebastian Stadil, co-founder and CEO of DevOps automation biz Scalr advised The Register. “Our position is that the fork is actually HashiCorp that has forked its own projects under a different license.”

OpenTF will revert again to, or proceed beneath, the MPL. “We’d love to license the project under the Apache 2.0, but the MPL isn’t compatible with it, so it’ll stay MPL,” stated Stadil.

Beyond Scalr, the founders of OpenTF embody Gruntwork, Spacelift, Env0, and, it is claimed, greater than 100 corporations. The group has described the BSL license as “a poison pill for the entire Terraform community.”

In an essay final week, Ohad Maislish, founding father of Env0, stated, “It is our belief that under the business license, the future of Terraform looks bleak. Community focus will shift, businesses will start looking for OSS alternatives, and independent tooling will gradually disappear.”

And over on Hacker News, Maislish made the level that the OpenTF gang had helped construct the Terraform ecosystem for HashiCorp.

“I wanted to mention that indeed Env0 enjoyed Terraform being free, but also contributed back to the Terraform ecosystem,” he stated, citing the open supply initiatives Terratag and an academic podcast about the software program as examples.

“Also important to mention another and probably a more important key member in the OpenTF initiative: Gruntwork, creators of Terragrunt and Terratest. I believe we all contributed nicely to the community. Just my two cents, in order to add a bit more context to ‘companies who make money from Terraform being free’.”

When challenged that Env0 stood to profit from these contributions, Maislish, who admitted his biz is “direct competition of Terraform Cloud,” insisted: “Hashicorp are not the baddies. They did what they chose is right for them. They have any right to do so. Also, what Hashi did for OSS in the last decade is amazing, made OSS better and built many communities. Now it is time for something/somebody else to keep Terraform OSS.”

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HashiCorp’s resolution to difficulty new licensing phrases for its software program follows a path trodden by quite a few different organizations shaped round open supply initiatives to restrict what rivals can do with venture code. As the biz acknowledged in its assertion about the transition, companies like Cockroach Labs, Confluent Sentry, Couchbase, Elastic, MariaDB, MongoDB, and Redis Labs have equally adopted less-permissive software program licenses to create a barrier for rivals.

The software program biz’s clarification for its shift focuses on the end result however doesn’t deal with its reasoning nor delve into particulars.

“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,” the developer stated.

It is in fact famously tough to straight earn money from FOSS work, which has led to programmers unpublishing code or making disruptive adjustments in protest.

In that, HashiCorp has our sympathy. While this was not the ultimate option to deal with it, it had some critical objective, Joseph Jacks of OSS Capital advised The Register:

We additionally word that makes an attempt to money in on Hudson didn’t go properly for Oracle, and the subsequent profitable fork Jenkins ended up thriving.

Stadil stated OpenTF has accomplished the paperwork to hitch The Linux Foundation (LF) and, as soon as there, expects to switch over to the LF’s subsidiary Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

No biggie for the competitors

Technically, Stadil stated, taking on the upkeep and enchancment of the codebase has been manageable.

“TerraForm is a large project, with hundreds and hundreds of providers,” he stated, “but fortunately, on the OpenTF team, we have people with experience with TerraForm. We have experience with people that have submitted PRs to TerraForm, so getting the project started has not been as much of a lift as we thought it would have been.”

Governance of the new venture beneath the Linux Foundation’s framework is nonetheless being sorted out. Stadil stated the group has already elected a Technical Steering Committee to supervise the advanced elements of the breakaway venture and plans to announce the names concerned shortly.

“For day-to-day coding, we already have a little bit more than a dozen people now contributing to the code base,” he stated. “These are folks that are currently or will be full-time on the project. We haven’t really decided who gets the title Core Maintainer versus others.”

Because they are not executing properly, different rivals like my firm Scalr and numerous others have stepped in

Stadil stated OpenTF has been well-received, leaping from 300 GitHub repo stars simply after the manifesto was posted to greater than 10x as many at present (about 4,600 at the time this text was filed). And he added that the official advice for any CNFC venture, like Kubernetes, is to make use of an open supply product to switch Terraform.

Asked why HashiCorp opted for a change of license, Stadil claimed: “The reality here is that HashiCorp is not executing well on its Terraform cloud product. And because they’re not executing well, other competitors like my company Scalr and a number of others have stepped in.”

Asked to elaborate, Stadil cited a number of attainable causes together with the firm’s pricing mannequin, which he described as altering always.

“Their pricing is all over the place,” he stated. “And whenever you change pricing, there’s always going to be some people who are better off with the new pricing and a lot of people who are worse off with the new pricing.”

That criticism was echoed just lately in a LinkedIn publish by Mike Hodgkins, employees engineer at compliance monitoring biz FundApps, who wrote that whereas Terraform has made enhancements to usability and safety, “The new pricing model sucks…”

HashiCorp didn’t reply to a request for remark. ®

PS: Terraform the product is to not be confused with Terraform Labs, the cryptocurrency outfit of some earlier infamy in El Reg.