Terraform Fork Gets Renamed OpenTofu, Joins Linux Foundation (techcrunch.com) 30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When HashiCorp announced it was changing its Terraform license in August, it set off a firestorm in the open source community, and actually represented an existential threat to startups that were built on top of the popular open source project. The community went into action and within weeks they had written a manifesto, and soon after that launched an official fork called OpenTF. Today, that group went a step further when the Linux Foundation announced OpenTofu, the official name for the Terraform fork, which will live forever under the auspices of the foundation as an open source project. At the same time, the project announced it would be applying for entry into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
"OpenTofu is an open and community-driven response to Terraform's recently announced license change from a Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPLv2) to a Business Source License v1.1 providing everyone with a reliable, open source alternative under a neutral governance model," the foundation said in a statement. The name is deliberately playful says Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman from the OpenTofu founding team, who is also co-founder of Gruntwork. "I'm glad your reaction was to laugh. That's a good thing. We're trying to keep things a little more humorous," Brikman told TechCrunch, but the group is dead serious when it comes to building an open fork. [...]
"The first thing was to get an alpha release out there. So you can go to the OpenTofu website and download OpenTofu and start using it and trying it out," he said. "Then the next thing is a stable release. That's coming in the very near future, but there's work to do. Once you have a stable release, people can start using it. Then we can start growing adoption, and once we start growing adoption, some of the big players will start stepping in when some of the big players start stepping in other big players will start stepping in as well."
"OpenTofu is an open and community-driven response to Terraform's recently announced license change from a Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPLv2) to a Business Source License v1.1 providing everyone with a reliable, open source alternative under a neutral governance model," the foundation said in a statement. The name is deliberately playful says Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman from the OpenTofu founding team, who is also co-founder of Gruntwork. "I'm glad your reaction was to laugh. That's a good thing. We're trying to keep things a little more humorous," Brikman told TechCrunch, but the group is dead serious when it comes to building an open fork. [...]
"The first thing was to get an alpha release out there. So you can go to the OpenTofu website and download OpenTofu and start using it and trying it out," he said. "Then the next thing is a stable release. That's coming in the very near future, but there's work to do. Once you have a stable release, people can start using it. Then we can start growing adoption, and once we start growing adoption, some of the big players will start stepping in when some of the big players start stepping in other big players will start stepping in as well."
What is the **** thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
IIUC, after following links to the Terraform site, this is a tool for automating something about running stuff in the cloud. I'm sure both parties would like a more elegant description of what they do, but they don't seem to offer one.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Make it three. I came to read the comments to see how out of touch I've become.. c
Open Tofu is Bad Tofu (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What is the **** thing? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Automated system landscape deployment for the cloud, i.e. "infrastructure as code". Essentially you describe what you want, point it at a cloud, and it builds this for you. The advantage is that recreating the installation and, if done right, even moving it to a different cloud is very easy. The disadvantage is that it needs more up-front effort. I have an audit-customer that does this and it seems to work pretty well for their case. It also makes recovery tests very easy.
Re:What is the **** thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
From what I've been reading, Terraform doesn't really abstract different cloud providers, leaving you to modify a lot of code if you move something from one provider to another anyway. I'm having a hard time seeing the advantage of something like that over conventional shell scripts.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you see... Chewbacca was a wookie...
You nailed it though. This thing is shell scripts for javascript kids and millenials. But it's for the cloud... not your grandpa's command shell.
Re: (Score:3)
Terraform doesn't really abstract different cloud providers
That's unfortunately right. Broke my heart that I had to write different code for different cloud providers.
Re: (Score:3)
A big advantage of opentofu is that it can get the state of the system and compare it to the state that the system was last put in by opentofu.
It also allows you to see some of the proposed changes so you can see what the scripts are going to change.
There are extensions that can do things like take your opentofu pull request and figure out how much a month increase or decrease in spend the pr is going to cost you. This allows you to make rules like PRs that are estimated to cost more than $2k a month requi
Re: (Score:2)
It depends. It is a bit more than "shell scripts" though. Do some automated deployment (I have experience with cluster installation using FAI) and you will notice that this is one of those things that look easy, but are very much not.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah- that's true. You do have to maintain separate versions of your terraform code for different providers, which is a bummer.
The advantage over shell scripts that I haven't really seen anyone mention here directly is that terraform develops and maintains a graph model of your infrastructure state. As things change, it can figure out what infrastructure pieces need to be updated and then update them. If you are in a scenario where you have, say, a mix of cloudflare, digitalocean, and any number of other 3r
We want simple declarative stuff (Score:2)
Then we need to make it cross-platform and dynamic.
Terraform's virtue is that it factors out the provider, e.g. AWS or Google, and lets you describe a linux instance in an agnostic way.
Think of it as an ORM for cloud hosts.
Which is awesome in a heterogeneous environment.
The other 99% of us don't have this problem, and can just code AWS in boto3 and get on with it.
Yet Another Monkey Fighting Configuration Language (YAMFCL) is a
Re: What is the **** thing? (Score:2)
Genuine question: how does somebody who doesnâ(TM)t know what Terraform even is end up reading Slashdot?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I've been a programmer in many different languages for quite a long time, but I've never had, or wanted to have, anything to do with the cloud.
Re: (Score:1)
Genuine question: how does somebody who doesnâ(TM)t know what Terraform even is end up reading Slashdot?
Well, probably because Terraform did not exist (for over a decade and a half) when we started to read Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
It is a BS service to BS your BS services.
In other words: it is BS.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a command-line tool that keeps a dependency chain of different "resources" that it can "create", "update", or "destroy", and it does all this by using plugins called "providers", that just call HTTP REST APIs. You tell it what to do with a domain-specific language called HashiCorp Language (HCL).
That's it.
"the community" (Score:1)
By community, you mean a group that is solely made up of the businesses that were "free loading" off of HashiCorp and competing directly against them with there work... okay. Sure... they're only doing this in the name of principles..
Re: (Score:1)
And not surprisingly their stock is very near it's all time low even when the rest of the tech market recovered (mostly) from the Covid era. I've been watching them since IPO but never convinced myself to buy any.
On the one hand I feel bad for them putting in effort and not making enough money to run a successful business, however, they chose to go open source and there's a cost to that they were unwilling to pay. No one owes anyone a successful business model.
Re: "the community" (Score:4, Informative)
Re: "the community" (Score:3)
Re: "the community" (Score:2)
The whole ecosystem of complex tools to solve problems created by other criminally over-complicated tools, terraform/AWS and everything else cloud, can go die in a fire. I really don't care who takes whose ideas or money in that shitshow.
The devops movement is embarrassing. It's all fun and games until you reach templated terraform or have to debug cloudinit. All of it can go to hell.
RIP (Score:2)
You might be gone, Terraform Fork, but your legend will live on!
Proof in the pudding: Open Source sucks unless (Score:3)
it's a foundation, or genuine grassroots community.
When an "open source project" is actually hosted, funded, and led by a single company, it's not really open source. It may be in letter, as in, their license is open source, they allow people to submit bug reports, etc. But they will also reject feature requests, issues, pull requests, UX changes, and other highly requested changes, if it goes against the "philosophy" (e.g. business goals) of "their" project.
Only when a project is organized and maintained by a diverse group of people without a singular motive does it become a really *good* Open Source project. You need to be able to argue for a change on the merits, and take votes from the entire community, and then actually do what was voted on. Or at least just be open to change, however radical, as long as it's what the users want. (Radical changes should be welcomed on an "alpha" or "unstable" release branch, where anything can break and you can experiment; the Linux kernel for example uses odd-numbered major releases to let crazy changes cook for a while before finally turning it into an "even" stable release branch)
Terraform has long excluded widely desired changes because it either went against their company's head engineer's "philosophy" for the tool, or it would cause some extra work for their customer support to explain to customers about the change, or it would just take away from their profit motive of you needing to pay for their "management" product. Simple stuff like just importing existing cloud resources has always been like wearing a hair shirt; you're punished by having to do a bunch of manual shit for 30 minutes that an algorithm could do for you in seconds.
If indeed this is being led by a foundation, and isn't just Gruntwork's new baby that they will refuse changes to if it competes with their corporate interests, then maybe, MAYBE, Terraform will finally get all the annoying stupid bullshit fixed. If not, then we should actually just abandon Terraform and its forks altogether. Otherwise we will be stuck in this backwards-ass world where you have to pay a "Terraform Admin" to learn all the backwards-ass bullshit needed to use the damn tool without blowing up production.
Re: (Score:3)
When an "open source project" is actually hosted, funded, and led by a single company, it's not really open source.
TLDR the rest. This is absolute BS. The fact that an author can dual license or change the license of their own code is a tremendous feature of open source, and this is a fucking fantastic example - the community immediately forked and will continue on. THAT WOULD NOT HAPPEN IF IT WERE NOT OPEN SOURCE.
Hashicorp "tried" to pull the rug out from under them, but the rug wasn't needed and was no real loss to the users. How is this not simply terrific news for open source?
Re: (Score:2)
What is it you think happened that was so great? What *materially* happened here? You had a free product, and it will remain free, under slightly different terms: "service providers" can't compete on the SaaS offerings that HashiCorp makes that utilize Terraform. So the fork comes along. Hooray! Open Source saves the day, the competing service providers can stay in business!
But what about the users?
From https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com] :
"Joe Duffy, founder and CEO of rival infrastructure-as-code vendor Pul
Re: (Score:2)
What is it you think happened that was so great? What *materially* happened here?
"Joe Duffy, founder and CEO of rival infrastructure-as-code vendor Pulumi, said: "The blog post is disingenuous. We tried many times to contribute upstream fixes to Terraform providers, but HashiCorp would never accept them. So we've had to maintain forks. They lost their OSS DNA a long time ago, and this move just puts the final nail in the coffin.""
What happened that was so great? Well, those other implementations were possible in the first place. Then, they were able to change the implementation as they saw fit, AND they could even build a business around that. They could have fully forked and did whatever they wanted with it. That's freaking incredible! And all their changes are made available to all of their users!!! How is that not fantastic?
The "Open Source" aspect was effectively only useful for getting a product for free.
Again, BS. They didn't just get the product for free. They also got all the source code, the option (which