-Igor Zalutski, CEO, Digger.dev
On August 10th, 2023, a surprising decision was taken that had significant implications for both Digger and the DevOps/IaC sphere. HashiCorp, unexpectedly, chose to relicense their projects with new, ambiguous terms, effectively transforming Terraform from an open source project to a closed one.
Terraform stands apart from tools like Vault, Consul, MongoDB, and ElasticSearch, as it functions as a language rather than a cloud service. Notably, the cloud-related aspect of Terraform was never open source to begin with. This alteration in licensing puts the entire array of open-source modules and tools reliant on the Terraform CLI in a precarious position.
At Digger, our firm belief lies in upholding an unbiased and community-led trajectory for Terraform. We, along with numerous other contributors, collaborators, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practitioners, earnestly urge HashiCorp to address these concerns within the community. Our proposal suggests donating Terraform to a suitable open source software foundation or, if that’s not feasible, reconsidering the licensing adjustment.
In light of these circumstances, we, in conjunction with the community, have introduced the OpenTF manifesto and are supporting a collaborative endeavor to secure an open source trajectory for Terraform.
While we sincerely hope that the community can find a shared path forward, we also know that hope is not a strategy, and that action must be taken to prevent the de facto lingua franca of the cloud from fading into oblivion.
