Comment on the news at IBM: Terraform is now part of the IBM family
The news is surprising, but is only logical in view of the hybrid cloud orientation. HashiCorp's change in licensing direction last year towards the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 has rightly caused frustration among open source enthusiasts. It would be desirable if IBM were to rely on the Apache Licence 2.0 in future, similar to Ansible.
At Empalis, we believe that open source software should be accessible without restrictions. Not only does this encourage the participation of others, but it also motivates many to engage with the solutions and develop expertise of their own.
Automation and development tools such as Terraform will continue to be an important part of infrastructure development in the future and are indispensable. However, it already seems too late for IBM to give in, as large companies such as Microsoft have already done.
The alternative OpenTofu
It can make sense to look for alternatives: OpenTofu was released a long time ago. It is based on the Terraform code, which was made available under the Mozilla Public Licence.
OpenTofu can already be used as a drop-in replacement for Terraform v1.5.x and most of v1.6.x. Even for the migration from v1.8.2 to OpenTofu 1.7.2 only minimal changes are necessary.
The future will show which projects will remain on the market in the long term and offer their customers the best possible approach.
Related links to OpenTofu
OpenTofu LinuxFoundation Projekt
OpenTofu source code
https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu
OpenTofu Installation
https://opentofu.org/docs/intro/install
OpenTofu Migration from Terraform 1.8.x
Do you have questions about Terraform and OpenTofu or Infrastructure-as-Code?
André Wild, Consultant
Phone +49172 541 142 29
