Linux Foundation announces fork OpenTofu following licensing changes at Terraform

The Linux Foundation has announced its own open source alternative to the cloud infrastructure tool Terraform. That is the former OpenTF, which is now called OpenTofu and is now publicly available after Terraform previously restricted access.

The Linux Foundation the service announced on Wednesday. The new tool is called OpenTofu and is a fork of Terraform. Terraform is one of the most popular tools for setting up and managing cloud infrastructure from a Linux environment. OpenTofu receives support from more than 140 companies and 600 people. Over the next five years, the Linux Foundation guarantees that at least eighteen full-time developers will work on the tool.

The developers promise in a manifesto that the tool will always be available as open source software. OpenTofu is available under a Mozilla Public License 2.0. The makers now have the source code posted on GitHub. In the future, the makers want to first create a registry and then release an alpha release. A stable version should follow afterwards, but the developers do not give a concrete timetable for this.

OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform. This is part of Hashicorp, which has offered the API free and open source under the same Mozilla license since 2014. However, problems arose at the end of last month. Then Hashicorp decided to change the license to a Business Source License v1.1. This is not an open license and may impose restrictions on use and on developers who want to do something with it themselves. The developers behind OpenTF then forked Terraform and decided to transfer it to the Linux Foundation. They did this after they received no response from Hashicorp to discuss the licensing. Under the Linux Foundation, the tool continues as OpenTofu, but that is an exact fork of Terraform.