OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

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2024-04-03 17:00:08

By Matt Asay

Contributor, InfoWorld |

OpenTofu’s founders had a mission. Upset by HashiCorp licensing changes in August 2023 to its popular Terraform infrastructure-as-code tool, OpenTofu set out to be the “open source successor to the MPLv2-licensed Terraform,” further promising that it “will be community-driven, impartial, layered and modular, and backward-compatible.”

Hugely promising, but extraordinarily difficult to pull off. So difficult in fact, that OpenTofu may have illegally taken HashiCorp’s code to keep pace.

At least, it’s hard to avoid that conclusion, perusing OpenTofu’s GitHub repositories and comparing them to HashiCorp’s. Specifically, OpenTofu appears to have lifted Terraform code related to a new removed block feature first implemented in Terraform V1.7, which was released under the Business Software License (BUSL) a few months after the OpenTofu fork was created. The tell? OpenTofu took this BUSL-licensed HashiCorp code, removed the headers, and tried to instead relicense it under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0).