Companies Launch Public Fork in Response to Hashicorp’s License Change
In response to the August Hashicorp Changing License TerRaform License to Business Source License (BSL), a number of companies, including Terrateam, Harness, Gruntwork, Spacelift, Env0, Digger, Massdriver and Terramat, which previously relied Terraform with open The source code, – immediately launched their own public fork this tool called optofu, which soon received support from the Linux Foundation.
David McGennet, General Director of Hashicorp, expressed his indignation with such a combination of circumstances and said: “If the funds of open source code sponsor third-party forks, there will soon be no open source companies in Silicon Valley.”
Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, answered these statements as follows: “Opentofu embodies our collective commitment to a truly open cooperation in the field of infrastructure as code. This approach corresponds to our common goal – the provision of reliable and affordable tools for the technology world.”
It is worth noting that among those companies that did not support the change in the Hashicorp license, there were not only small organizations, but also real giants of the industry. So, the world insurance conglomerate Allianz opened the transition to Opentofu.
As it is already easy to guess, many participants in the open source community criticized McGzhennet. For example, Joe Brookmeyer from Percona noted: “The possibility of creating a fork is sacred. For a wider community, including companies that introduce open source software, this is insurance, according to which everyone has the opportunity to purchase software and continue to use, improve and distribute it.”
Mike Dollan, the senior vice president of the Linux Foundation, said that TerRaform exists in the form in which it is, only thanks to the support of the community, and the developers would have gone for decades to recreate the product of similar functionality on their own. Therefore, it is very selfish to change the model of their activities on BSL.
Since the announcement of Hashicorp on the change in the license, the company’s shares have fallen by