OpenTF begins HashiCorp Terraform fork, pledges donation

Terraform fork response mixed, but momentum builds

Some spectators to the ongoing HashiCorp Terraform licensing drama cheered the move this week, saying they hoped it would serve as a warning to other vendors about the consequences of changing open source licenses to closed ones.

"I'm a staunch supporter of open source, and I'm excited to hear that such a crucial component in the infrastructure space will continue to exist as such," said Anders Eknert, a developer advocate at Styra, a commercial backer of CNCF's Open Policy Agent project.

"Hopefully the fork will be successful enough to send a clear signal to other corporations thinking that going from open source to a proprietary license is a lucrative option," Eknert said, who emphasized he was speaking for himself as an individual open source supporter and contributor, not on behalf of his employer.

A member of the HashiCorp Ambassadors program, a group of non-employees that get inside access to HashiCorp's releases and a chance to influence development of its tools, also supported the move to fork Terraform.

"An open source fork of the newly not-open-source Terraform is a natural consequence of Hashi backing away from the open source community that has helped enrich them and get them to this point," said Kyler Middleton, senior principal software engineer at healthcare tech company Veradigm.

Middleton said she understands that maintaining software is costly and that HashiCorp wants to make money, but the original contributor license agreement she and others signed said that the software would remain open source.

"I'm excited to see the advent of OpenTF, and I'll be reaching out to them to see how I can help them with building a truly open source software in this space," Middleton said.

If the CNCF accepts donation of the Terraform fork, it would give the project "instant credibility," said Paul Delory, an analyst at Gartner.

"The most interesting possibility is that [the Terraform fork] acquires a new front-end that competes directly with Terraform Enterprise [TFE] and Cloud," Delory said. "Some IT shops don't like TFE -- it’s expensive, often prohibitively so, and some folks … preferred the developer experience of Scalr or Spacelift. … if OpenTF had its own user front end, some folks might prefer it."

Still, other industry watchers remained skeptical of the OpenTF effort.

Rick Rackow

"So far nothing happened, basically," said Rick Rackow, expert site reliability engineer at TomTom, a geolocation tech company in Amsterdam. "You know how they say, 'Seeing is believing?' So far I'm not seeing anything except a manifesto and an announcement. They didn't join a foundation; neither did they create their own."

Creating a fork is easy, Rackow added.

"Keeping it alive -- and, [in the] best case, creating a flourishing community around it that at some point turns into its own thing -- is the hard part," he said.

Even if the fork flourishes, it can potentially bring about licensing complications for users in the future, Delory said.

"When commercial projects coexist alongside open-source forks, there can be cross-pollination of code," he said. "One adopts similar concepts from the other. This can get messy and make a lot of people mad."

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at TechTarget Editorial, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. She can be reached at [email protected]or on Twitter @PariseauTT.