How HashiCorp's license shakeup seeded a new open source rebel HashiCorp might be less than impressed with the rise of the Terraform fork, OpenTofu, but where Hashi sees challenges, the maintainers of the open source project see opportunities. OpenTofu sprang into existence following HashiCorp's 2023 decision to adopt the Business Source License, thus taking its popular Terraform …
That's not even close to true. No hyperscalers use terraform, much less try to sell it competing against Hashi. Most of them don't even support it. They all have competing tools that they would much rather people use to lock them in. Maybe a case could be made for Vault/etc, but even then, hyperscalers already had secrets solved before vault was useable by mere mortals. Hashicorp's license change is nothing like MongoDB/Redis. I'm not going to guess what all was behind the decision, but the end result is most open source devs don't want to contribute to non-open-source projects, so a fork of some sort was inevitable.
Of course. Who can forget evil AWS taking all of Terraform to -- sorry, what, they use Cloud Formation instead and want people to use that, grudgingly accepting Terraform? I meant it's evil Microsoft with their -- they have one too? Well, where's my evil company I can point at and say that everything is your fault? The people who ignore all of open source in the search for money? I think the best candidate in this situation is... Hashicorp. They're the ones that took the work of contributors, without paying them, and incorporated it in a version that they sell for money, then blocked those contributors from using their own code* if they competed with Hashicorp, as determined by Hashicorp's lawyers.
* Unless they forked before the license change, which effectively means using OpenTofu because they don't want to maintain a ton of forks.
There's a reason I have mostly used Terraform or the fork. I've used ARM for Azure and Cloud Formation for AWS, and neither was great and both were pretty useless on any other system. Terraform is also kind of painful* and I don't much like it, but learning it can at least be useful in multiple types of deployments.
* Terraform is a functional language without being able to write functions. It supports complex data types, including nesting, but the code to untangle it ends up getting very large and ungainly if you ever find that you need them. Some of its competitors don't even support those types at all. IaC doesn't have the best tools.
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