The future of Terraform must be open

Therefore, we have joined forces with a number of other companies to create the OpenTF manifesto. The goal of the manifesto is to ensure Terraform remains truly open source — always.

To this end, the manifesto lays out the following two-step plan:

1. Ask HashiCorp to switch Terraform back to open source. The manifesto is a public request—a petition wi

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As a result of the change to BSL, there is now no certainty with using Terraform:

• If you’re a CTO, and you’re picking an IaC tool to use at your company, if you see that Terraform is BSL licensed, why take the risk? You’re now much more likely to go with alternative tools that are truly open source and have no licensing headaches.


• If you’re on the l

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Up until last Friday, it seemed like HashiCorp had this balance just right. They did so by making most functionality open source, but reserving some functionality solely for their commercial products, such as Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise. With this approach, the Terraform community grew, companies that used Terraform grew, and, of cours... See more

To some extent, we understand what led HashiCorp in this direction. They are trying to maintain a delicate balance: on the one hand, they are creating amazing value by providing high quality, free, open source software to a community of thousands of developers; on the other hand, they are trying to run a sustainable business, so they need to captur... See more

This led to a virtuous cycle: as more companies adopt Terraform, more developers start using it; those developers contribute to Terraform, fixing bugs, improving security, adding new features, creating new tools and extensions, etc.; that makes Terraform even more compelling, so even more companies adopt it, and the cycle continues. As a result, Te... See more

Terraform was originally released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) v2.0, which is a well-known, trusted, and permissive open source license: MPL allows you to use Terraform for just about any purpose and incorporate it into any product, including copying, modifying, and redistributing the code. The only limitation is that if you modify the so... See more