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).
Then, the internet lost its mind.
Suddenly, everyone was screaming about vendor lock-in and corporate greed. OpenTofu pops up, forked from Terraform 1.5.x, waving the open-source flag under the Linux Foundation. Déjà vu, this is MariaDB and LibreOffice all over again, where the community rallied against the big & bad company.
And I get it. I’ve been there & 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 now 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.
I’ve seen enough tech cycles to know that open-source isn’t just about free code. Open-source is about people, effort, and money. HashiCorp poured years and millions into Terraform. It’s the gold standard for infrastructure-as-code, it personally manages all my 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 a thing for me (And for most people).
Looking at it from a business perspective, 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) or the infra of the company I work for. The BSL lets me use Terraform for free, same as always. If I ever want to be HashiCorp competitor, 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. And I’m not going to punish HashiCorp for trying to survive.
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. Also, the BSL isn’t a closed-source death sentence, but a pivot to protect their business. Unlike Oracle’s MySQL shenanigans, HashiCorp is still updating Terraform and is still supporting the community. They’re not abandoning us, they’re just asking competitors to pay their share. I 100% respect that.
My younger self would’ve forked over to OpenTofu, but maturity taught me companies deserve a second chance. HashiCorp’s earned it with years of innovation.
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 already without adding migration headaches. If OpenTofu becomes popular, introduces the risk of drift, and I’m not willing to take that risk. 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 is 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, but also about balance. HashiCorp’s holding up their end, so I’m holding up mine.