Terra-fork

Okay, so I swiped the headline from the video, but it’s pretty much a given.

Further to my previous blog entry about Hashicorp’s decision to change Terraform’s license, I mentioned how the OpenTF Initiative put a choice to Hashicorp: change the license back or we will fork Terraform.

Unsurprisingly, Hashicorp didn’t comply, so now Terraform has (or will be) forked as OpenTF at https://github.com/opentffoundation

This story has been covered in several places including The Register and several videos on YouTube including a nice short summary by Fireship

If the fork goes ahead, I’m curious as to whether Hashicorp sees it as a competition and goes after the foundation, but if it does, what little reputation Hashicorp has left in the OSS community will be nigh on destroyed.

Meanwhile, I’m going to continue playing with Pulumi in case the OpenTF doesn’t work, gets blocked or if we need another alternative.

Google Domains and Terraform

Two major updates recently

Firstly, as suspected, I finally got the notification saying that Google Domains’ registrations would be acquired by SquareSpace so all my registrations would be transferred over them should I not do anything. Obviously, I didn’t want that, so I transferred them over to AWS (Route 53) so now my domains are registered with AWS, but are DNS managed by Cloud DNS. I had some weirdness when trying to migrate all my domains in bulk, with respect to the auth code not being accepted on one of the domains when doing the bulk migration, but it was accepted when I did the migration on that one domain alone, so… go figure.

Next update is Terraform. In case you didn’t know, Hashicorp has changed the Terraform license and essentially made it no longer open source. This behaviour is similar to what Red Hat did with its RHEL offering and the backlash is just as bad.

Immediately I knew someone would fork it, and already, there’s the OpenTF Initiative and this is the key part:

Our request to HashiCorp: switch Terraform back to an open source license.

We ask HashiCorp to do the right thing by the community: instead of going forward with the BUSL license change, switch Terraform back to a truly open source license, and commit to keeping it that way forever going forward. That way, instead of fracturing the community, we end up with a single, impartial, reliable home for Terraform where the whole community can unite to keep building this amazing ecosystem.

Our fallback plan: fork Terraform into a foundation.

If HashiCorp is unwilling to switch Terraform back to an open source license, we propose to fork the legacy MPL-licensed Terraform and maintain the fork in the foundation. This is similar to how Linux and Kubernetes are managed by foundations (the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, respectively), which are run by multiple companies, ensuring the tool stays truly open source and neutral, and not at the whim of any one company.

OpenTF Initiative (https://opentf.org/)

Essentially, make Terraform open source again, or a fork from the MPL version will be made and maintained separately from Hashicorp’s version. This will essentially lead to two, potentially diverging versions of Terraform, one BUSL and one MPL licensed

I’m already looking at alternatives and the two currently that I’m looking at are Ansible and Pulumi

Ansible I’ve had experience in , but there’s two main issues with it:

  • It’s underused compared to Terraform and the providers are woefully undersupported and undermaintained
  • It’s Red Hat

Pulumi I’ve heard lots of good things about, but its a new technology, and I don’t know if it is can “Import” existing infrastructure.

Guess a “spike” is worth doing for it.