What HashiCorp’s License Change Means for env0 Customers

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Updates:‍

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‍August 25th, 2023: The OpenTF initiative officially announces an open-source fork of Terraform.

September 5th, 2023:  The OpenTF repository goes public, shortly after our manifesto reaches over 32,000 GitHub Stars.

September 20th, 2023: OpenTF joins the Linux Foundation and changes it's name to OpenTofu

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On August 10, 2023, HashiCorp announced a change of license for its products, including Terraform. After ~9 years of Terraform being open source under the MPL v2 license, it was to move under a non-open source BSL v1.1 license, starting from the next (1.6) version.

It is our belief that under the business license, the future of Terraform looks bleak. Community focus will shift, businesses will start looking for OSS alternatives, and independent tooling will gradually disappear. 

Simply put, the license is a poison pill for the Terraform ecosystem. One that will also have a ripple effect on other open-source projects, and undermine the credibility of open-source as a concept.

With this in mind, we are proud to be one of the first companies to join together in OpenTF, an initiative to keep Terraform open source–forever. So far we are joined by over 100 organizations, and hundreds of individual developers, all of whom pledged to contribute to the project. The GitHub repo hosting the OpenTF manifest has over 2,200 stars as of August 23rd.

As for our platform (unless HashiCorp reverts their decision), env0 will not work with any BSL-licensed versions of Terraform, which means that:

• As long as you use Terraform 1.5.x or older, you don’t need to take any action, as these versions are all MPL licensed.
• ‍For future versions of Terraform, as OpenTF will be compatible with Terraform, you won’t need to change any code. The only difference is that env0 will run the OpenTF binary in the background, instead of the Terraform binary.

The Open Source Future of Terraform

We are proud to help make OpenTF a reality. The future of OSS Terraform is:‍

• Truly open source - under a well-known and widely-accepted license that companies can trust, and isn't subject to the whims of a single vendor
• ‍Community-driven - so that the community governs the project and pull requests are regularly reviewed and accepted, based on merit
• Impartial - so that valuable features and fixes are accepted based on their value to the community, regardless of their impact on any particular vendor
• Layered and modular - with a programmer-friendly project structure to encourage building on top, enabling a new vibrant ecosystem of tools and integrations
• Backwards-compatible - so that the existing code can drive value for years to come

Together with other key OpenTF supporters, we will commit our resources to ensure this open, sustainable, and inclusive future for an open-source Terraform.

Stay tuned.