OpenTofu, OpenBao reach milestones post-HashiCorp BSL
In the year since HashiCorp's move to a Business Source License for all its products, open source forks of its Terraform and Vault tools have gained traction, although without any discernible effect on HashiCorp's growth.
OpenTofu, a fork of HashiCorp's Terraform infrastructure-as-code tool, was proposed nearly immediately after HashiCorp revealed its plan to transition to a BSL in August 2023, and officially launched as a Linux Foundation project a month later. It became generally available or production-ready with version 1.6 in January, and in April defied a HashiCorp cease-and-desist letter with an update that refined the refactoring process for configuration code. That release, version 1.7, also contained client-side state encryption, a feature unavailable in Terraform.
OpenTofu maintainers have not said how many IT organizations have put the software into production, but according to GitHub, OpenTofu has more than 100 contributors and 22,400 stars, corresponding to the number of GitHub users who have marked its repository as a favorite. Its maintainers are primarily from Spacelift and Env0, two of the commercial competitors targeted by HashiCorp's BSL terms.
