The OpenTF Manifesto

Terraform was open-sourced in 2014 under the Mozilla Public License (v2.0) (the “MPL”). Over the next ~9 years, it built up a community that included thousands of users, contributors, customers, certified practitioners, vendors, and an ecosystem of open-source modules, plugins, libraries, and extensions. Then, on August 10th, 2023, with little or no advance notice or chance for much, if not all, of the community to have any input, HashiCorp switched the license for Terraform from the MPL to the Business Source License (v1.1) (the “BUSL”), a non-open source license. In our opinion, this change threatens the entire community and ecosystem that's built up around Terraform over the last 9 years.

Our concern: the BUSL license is a poison pill for Terraform.

Overnight, tens of thousands of businesses, ranging from one-person shops to the Fortune 500 woke up to a new reality where the underpinnings of their infrastructure suddenly became a potential legal risk. The BUSL and the additional use grant written by the HashiCorp team are vague. Now, every company, vendor, and developer using Terraform has to wonder whether what they are doing could be construed as competitive with HashiCorp's offerings. The FAQ provides some solace for end-customers and systems integrators today, but even if you might be in the clear now, how can you build confidence that your usage won't violate the license terms in the future? What if your products or HashiCorp's products change? What if HashiCorp changes how they interpret “competitive”? What if they change the license again? As a result, everything that uses Terraform is on shaky ground.

It is clear that under the new license, the thriving ecosystem built around the open-source Terraform will dwindle and wither. As developers consider what tools to learn and what ecosystems to contribute to, and as companies consider what tools to use to manage their infrastructure, more and more, they'll pick alternatives that are genuinely open-source. Existing Terraform codebases will turn into outdated liabilities, independent tooling will all but disappear, and the community will fracture and disappear.

This sort of change also harms all similar open-source projects. Every company and every developer now needs to think twice before adopting and investing in an open-source project in case the creator suddenly decides to change the license. Imagine if the creators of Linux or Kubernetes suddenly switched to a non-open-source license that only permitted non-competitive usage.

We believe that the essential building blocks of the modern Internet, such as Linux, Kubernetes, and Terraform need to be truly open source: that is the only way to ensure that we are building our industry on top of solid and predictable underpinnings.

Our goal: ensure Terraform remains truly open source—always.

Our aim with this manifesto is to return Terraform to a fully open-source license. BUSL is not open source, so this would mean moving Terraform back to the MPL license, or some other well-known, widely accepted open-source license (e.g., Apache License 2.0). Moreover, we want to be confident that Terraform will always remain open source, so you don't have to worry about another sudden license change putting everything at risk.

Our request to HashiCorp: switch Terraform back to an open-source license.

We ask HashiCorp to do the right thing by the community: instead of going forward with the BUSL license change, switch Terraform back to a truly open source license and commit to keeping it that way forever going forward. That way, instead of fracturing the community, we end up with a single, impartial, reliable home for Terraform where the whole community can unite to keep building this amazing ecosystem.

Our fallback plan: fork Terraform into a foundation.

If HashiCorp is unwilling to switch Terraform back to an open-source license, we propose to fork the legacy MPL-licensed Terraform and maintain the fork in the foundation. This is similar to how Linux and Kubernetes are managed by foundations (the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, respectively), which are run by multiple companies, ensuring the tool stays truly open source and neutral and not at the whim of any one company.

In particular, we want to create a foundation for Terraform that is:

• Truly open source - under a well-known and widely-accepted license that companies can trust, that won't suddenly change in the future and isn't subject to the whims of a single vendor
• Community-driven - so that the community governs the project for the community, where pull requests are regularly reviewed and accepted on their merit
• Impartial - so that valuable features and fixes are accepted based on their value to the community, regardless of their impact on any particular vendor
• Layered and modular - with a programmer-friendly project structure to encourage building on top, enabling a new vibrant ecosystem of tools and integrations
• Backwards-compatible - so that the existing code can drive value for years to come

Contact us

If you are a member of the community, a member of the press, an employee of HashiCorp, or anyone else with questions or feedback to share, you can reach the team behind this manifesto by emailing us at pledge@opentf.org.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is OpenTF going to be a foundation?

We strongly prefer joining an existing reputable foundation over creating a new one. Stay tuned for additional details in the coming week.

Can anyone pledge?

Yes, the pledge is open to both all individuals and all companies who care about the future of Terraform. You can also support this initiative by starring this manifesto repository on GitHub and spreading the word via share buttons.

I'm a regular Terraform user, and I'm not competing with HashiCorp. Why should I care?

How do you know you're not competing with HashiCorp?

That's not meant to be a redundant or snarky question. The key issue with the BUSL is that the wording is intentionally vague. What does "competing" mean? What does "hosting or embedding" mean? Who decides?

The answer to all these questions is that, in order to really know if you're a competitor, you have to reach out to HashiCorp. So whether your usage is valid is not controlled by the terms of the license, but is instead entirely at the whim of HashiCorp. They get to decide on a case-by-case basis who is and who isn't a competitor—and they can change their mind at any time.

That is a very shaky footing on which to build anything.

At every company you ever work at in the future, before starting to use Terraform, the CTO will have to think about whether HashiCorp could possibly consider you a competitor, now or at any time in the future. The legal team at that company will have to wonder if they want to take the risk of allowing a BUSL license or if they should ban it due to all the uncertainty. Every developer at that company will have to wonder if they want to contribute back to Terraform, given there's no certainty they'll be able to use their own work at a future job.

In short, the BUSL is a poison pill for the entire Terraform community.

Doesn't forking hurt the whole community? Why take such a brash action?

Terraform was under the MPL license for ~9 years. This created an understanding—an implicit contract—that Terraform is open-source and you can use it for just about anything you want. Based on that understanding, tens of thousands of developers adopted the tool and contributed back to it. HashiCorp even had all contributors sign a CLA which explicitly said (link to the CLA in the Internet Archive as HashiCorp has of course removed this wording):

HashiCorp is committed to having a true Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) license for our non-commercial software. A CLA enables HashiCorp to safely commercialize our products while keeping a standard FOSS license with all the rights that the license grants to users: the ability to use the project in their own projects or businesses, to republish modified source, or to fork the project completely.

The move to BUSL—which is not a free and open source license—broke the implicit contract. That was the brash action!

Terraform would've never gotten the adoption it did, or all the contributions from the community had it not been open-source. Most of us would've never agreed to the CLA to contribute to the project if it was BUSL licensed. Taking all those contributions and all that community trust, and then changing to the BUSL license is a bait and switch.

The OpenTF manifesto is about undoing those changes! It's about going back to the way Terraform was for the first ~9 years: as a truly open-source tool that we can all trust, contribute to, and use as we wish.

Didn't HashiCorp adopt BUSL to deter vendors who were using Terraform but not contributing back?

In the blog post where HashiCorp announces the switch to BUSL, and they justify the license switch as a response to the following:

However, there are other vendors who take advantage of pure OSS models, and the community work on OSS projects, for their own commercial goals, without providing material contributions back. We don’t believe this is in the spirit of open source.

This is inaccurate and misleading. First of all, many of the vendors affected by the change to BUSL have made considerable contributions to the Terraform community. Here are just a handful of examples:

• Terraform binaries: Terraform core has 1,700+ contributors. The Terraform AWS provider has 2,800+. The Azure provider has 1,300+. The vast majority of these contributors do not work at HashiCorp. And that's not even counting the thousands of other providers in the Terraform Registry that built with no HashiCorp involvement at all.
• Terraform modules: There are 14K+ in the Terraform Registry alone. The vast majority of these were not built by HashiCorp employees.
• Terraform tools: There are hundreds of tools such as Terragrunt, Terratest, tfsec, tflint, Infracost, terraform-docs, and countless others that were not built by HashiCorp employees.
• Learning resources: There are thousands of books, blog posts, courses, and courses, such as Terraform: Up & Running, Terraform Best Practices, Udemy courses, Pluralsight courses, and many others that were not created by HashiCorp employees.

And so much more. Tools like Terraform don't live in isolation: they are part of a large ecosystem. The same is true of Kubernetes or Linux or Go or other major infrastructure tools. The ecosystem is a big part of why you pick those tools in the first place: that way, you know you'll be able to hire people who know the tools, find answers to your questions online, find libraries/extensions/etc to save you time, and so on.

Of course, no one is questioning HashiCorp's contribution here. They created Terraform and led the project to where it is today. They deserve full credit for that. But to not acknowledge the tens of thousands of developers, many of whom worked at a variety of "vendors," who contributed to the ecosystem and played a pivotal role in Terraform's success is misleading, at best.

Terraform didn't get to where it is today solely due to HashiCorp's involvement. The entire community, vendors included, played a huge part in that. To not acknowledge that is bad. To then take all those contributions from the community—which would've never happened had Terraform not been open source—and put them under a commercial license so those contributors might not be able to use their own work in the future is even worse.

And finally, there have been many contributions that were attempted, but HashiCorp rejected them because it made their paid offerings (TFC/TFE) less compelling. The classic one is the dozens of issues and PRs submitted about encrypting state, all of which TF has ignored, as storing state securely is a selling point of TFC/TFE.

HashiCorp deserves to earn a return on their investment. What's wrong with that?

When any company releases their tool as open source, the contract with the community is always the same: Anyone can use this code, but we the creators hold a privileged position of being at the epicenter of the ecosystem. Vendors then compete to offer the best solution, and the creators enjoy a unique competitive advantage.

We believe that HashiCorp should earn a return by leveraging its unique position in the Terraform ecosystem to build a better product, not by outright preventing others from competing in the first place.

Supporters

We acknowledge that maintaining an open-source project such as Terraform takes a considerable investment in terms of time, skill, effort, and coordination. We are grateful to HashiCorp for creating Terraform and their leadership in getting it to this point, and to the thousands of community members for their contributions so far. The next step for Terraform must be to remain open source, either by HashiCorp switching it back to a truly open-source license or by us forking it into a foundation. Whichever way it turns out, to ensure that there is sufficient investment to grow and evolve Terraform, the signatories below pledge to pool our resources to build a more open, inclusive future for an open-source Terraform.

Instructions

If you’re willing to join our cause, please sign the manifesto as follows:

1. Check out the manifesto repo (instructions).
2. Add a new row to the end of the table below with your details.
3. Open a pull request with your changes (instructions).