OpenTofu Amiable to a Terraform Reconciliation
For OpenTofu co-maintainer, Sebastian Stadil the news of IBM acquiring HashiCorp was not exactly a surprise. Like the rest of us, he had heard the rumors of an acquisition for a few days beforehand.
But now that the pending ingestion of HashiCorp into the historically open source-friendly IBM is now officially underway, OpenTofu, as an open source collective, must be suddenly wondering what IBM’s plans are for Terraform.
“A lot of [OpenTofu] folks were puzzled about what exactly IBM intends to do, beyond all of the marketing speak,” Stadil said. “We’re hopeful that IBM understands open source better than HashiCorp does.”
Will IBM revert the Terraform (and the rest of the HashiCorp portfolio) back into open source, reversing HashiCorp’s decision last August to put future releases of its flagship IT provisioning software under a Business Source License (BSL), to restrict competitors?
If so, what will happen to OpenTofu, a Linux Foundation-supported fork of Terraform made specifically to keep the code as open source?
OpenTofu is absolutely open to “remerging” (unforking?) with a sufficiently open sourced Terraform, and always has been, Stadil said.
“Nobody likes split communities. Nobody likes fragmentation of efforts. So we would welcome Terraform,” Stadil said, suggesting the two efforts could be combined under the Linux Foundation.
Open source remains a selling point, in varying degrees, for enterprises.
In fact, OpenTofu and IBM have already been in talks since the announced acquisition (about what, Stadil declined to say).
What IBM decides to do with its $6.4 billion acquisition, however, is still an open question, though early statements indicate the HashiCorp stack being instrumental in an ambitious hybrid cloud offering, most likely in conjunction with Red Hat‘s open source enterprise backend software, also an IBM conquest.
Since OpenTofu’s launch last September, IBM has been very helpful to the project, in terms of engineer time and general support, Stadil said.
Some automation synergies between Terraform and Red Hat’s Ansible could be afoot as well.
What Is New in OpenTofu?
All through the acquisition chatter last week, the OpenTofu collective kept to the mission of preparing the first stable release for the software, OpenTofu 1.7.0 which was released Tuesday.
This new edition can act as a drop-in replacement for the last open source version of Terraform, v15.
In addition to the usual assortment of stability enhancements, this release also has two major new features long requested by Terraform users: end-to-end state encryption and dynamic provider-defined functions.
With end-to-end encryption, configuration files remain encrypted both in transit and at rest. This has been a much-requested feature for systems of high sensitivity. Files can be locked by passcode, a cloud key management system, or OpenBao, an IBM-led fork of HashiCorp Vault.
Provider-defined functions allow users to create their own functions which can be executed during provisioning.
Completing the 1.7 release reinforced the confidence of Stadil, who is also CEO of the OpenTofu/Terraform service provider Scalr, in the long-term maintainability of OpenTofu as an independent open source project, especially given the influx of outside contributors to the effort.
This release had 65 unique contributors. Since January, over 200 new issues have been identified (and just as many pull requests filed).
Scalr has also launched Library.tf, a community repository for Terraform modules.
Work on v1.8 is already underway, with plans to let users declare variables in their module sources.
TNS research analyst Lawrence Hecht contributed to this report.
