Back in the day, I was that guy. The one who’d jump ship the second a company made a move I didn’t like. Oracle scoops up MySQL? I’m on the MariaDB train faster than you can say “GPL.” OpenOffice starts feeling like Oracle’s neglected stepchild? LibreOffice, here I come. Young, idealistic, and ready to fight for open-source purity, I saw every corporate shift as a betrayal. But now, with HashiCorp’s Terraform licensing drama stirring up the tech world, I’m not packing my bags for OpenTofu.
I’m sticking with Terraform, and here’s why
Let’s rewind. HashiCorp dropped a bombshell in August 2023, swapping Terraform’s Mozilla Public License (MPL) for the Business Source License (BSL). The internet lost its mind. Suddenly, everyone’s screaming about vendor lock-in and corporate greed. OpenTofu (née OpenTF) pops up, forked from Terraform 1.5.x, waving the open-source flag under the Linux Foundation. It’s MariaDB and LibreOffice all over again, where the community rallied against the big bad company.
And I get it. I’ve been there and I did that.
When Oracle bought Sun in 2010, MySQL’s future looked shaky. Would Oracle close the code? Jack up prices? I didn’t wait to find out. MariaDB, forked by MySQL’s own co-founder, was a no-brainer. Same with OpenOffice. Oracle’s neglect and StarOffice push had me downloading LibreOffice before the ink dried on their acquisition papers. Hey, both forks worked out. MariaDB is in every major Linux distro and LibreOffice is many’s go-to for docs.
But those were different times, and I was a different guy.
Fast forward to now, and I’m not the wide-eyed coder chasing ideals. I’ve seen enough tech cycles to know that open-source isn’t just about free code. Open-source it’s about people, effort, and money. HashiCorp poured years and millions into Terraform. It’s the gold standard for infrastructure-as-code, managing my AWS/Aliyun setups with zero hiccups. It’s reliable, battle-tested, and backed by an ecosystem of providers and modules that make my life easier. The BSL? It doesn’t change that for me.
See, the BSL only kicks in if you’re building a competing service or embedding Terraform in a commercial product. I’m, like most, just deploying my own infra (VPCs, RDS instances, the usual). The BSL lets me use Terraform for free, same as always. If I ever turn my setups into a SaaS or consulting gig, I’m happy to pay HashiCorp. They built the damn thing. If I profit off their work, coughing up a license fee feels fair.
It’s not betrayal; it’s economics.
I look at OpenTofu, and I see the same fire I had back then. It’s a solid fork, drop-in compatible, and the Linux Foundation’s stamp gives it cred. But I also see a community jumping the gun. HashiCorp isn’t Oracle. The BSL isn’t a closed-source death sentence, but a pivot to protect their business. Unlike Oracle’s MySQL shenanigans, HashiCorp’s still updating Terraform, still supporting the community. They’re not abandoning us; they’re asking competitors to pay their share. I respect that.
My younger self would’ve forked over to OpenTofu faster than you can say “git clone.” But maturity taught me companies deserve a second chance. HashiCorp’s earned it with years of innovation. I think of MySQL and OpenOffice and, sure, MariaDB and LibreOffice won out, but Oracle didn’t kill the originals overnight. HashiCorp’s not even close to that level of corporate overreach. Dropping Terraform now feels like punishing them for trying to survive.
There’s also the practical side. Terraform’s ecosystem is a beast of thousands of providers, modules, and docs I lean on daily. OpenTofu is still catching up with features, but it’s not there yet. Why mess with a setup that works? My RDS configs, my VPC peering scripts… they all hum along fine. Switching risks breaking something, and I’ve got enough gray hairs without adding migration headaches. Plus, HashiCorp’s enterprise support is a safety net I’d rather not ditch when I use Terraform for… well, making money myself.
Don’t get me wrong, if HashiCorp actually pulls an Oracle, I’ll reconsider. For now, though, I’m not buying the panic. Terraform’s still the tool that gets my infra up and running, and I’m not about to ditch it over licensing FUD. I’ve learned that open-source isn’t just about ideals; it’s about balance. HashiCorp’s holding up their end, so I’m holding up mine.