Announcing OpenTF

On August 10th, 2023 a single decision was made which took Scalr and the DevOps world by surprise: HashiCorp decided to relicense their projects to new vague terms which ended Terraform as an open source project.

At this time, there is no impact to our operations or your projects utilizing Scalr. The license change only impacts future Terraform versions. It is also worth noting that we do not embed any Terraform components in our source code, which is a key aspect of the license. That being said, we are planning for the future as there is no clarity on what Hashi might do next. The FAQs and clarifications they have made only seem to make everyone more confused.  

Terraform is different from Vault or Consul (or MongoDB or ElasticSearch). It is a language, not a cloud service. The cloud component of Terraform was never open-source in the first place. As a result of this change, the entire ecosystem of open-source modules and tools that depend on the Terraform CLI are at risk.

As I mentioned in our beta announcement over two years ago, we believe in preserving an impartial and community-driven path for Terraform. We ask that HashiCorp address these community concerns by donating Terraform to an appropriate open source software foundation, or, failing that, reconsider the licensing change for Terraform.

For this reason, we, along with the community, have put forward the OpenTF Manifesto and are backing a community effort to ensure an open source path forward.

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 Infrastructure as Code language from fading into irrelevance.

How You Can Help!

• You can help by starring the repo with the Manifesto
• Spread the word in your organization, online communities, or social media (#opentf)
• Create a PR against the Manifesto to pledge your organization

As always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out at support.scalr.com