OpenTofu Joins CNCF as a Sandbox Project, Competing with Terraform

OpenTofu, an open-source Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tool, has officially joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a sandbox project as of April 23. This decision was made by the OpenTofu community, marking a significant step for the tool in the competitive landscape of IaC solutions.

OpenTofu was created as a fork of the widely used IaC tool Terraform, following HashiCorp's controversial transition of Terraform's licensing from the Mozilla Public License (MPL-2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL-1.1). This move has sparked debates within the open-source community, particularly regarding the implications of BSL for the accessibility and modification of software. Organizations often adopt BSL to safeguard specific business interests, such as managed services, which can cause friction within the developer community.

By establishing OpenTofu under an open-source license, the project aims to maintain its accessibility and community-driven development. Since its inception, OpenTofu has been supported by the Linux Foundation, which also oversees CNCF.

Several prominent companies are backing OpenTofu, including Harness, Gruntwork, Spacelift, Env0, and Scair. Collectively, these organizations have pledged to support the project for a minimum of five years, contributing a total of nineteen full-time developers to its development. Currently, the OpenTofu project boasts a broad base of support, with 163 companies and 791 individual contributors actively involved.

The source code for OpenTofu is publicly available on GitHub, with the current release being version 1.9.1. Development for version 1.10.0 is already underway and is reported to be 75% complete according to the project's roadmap.

As OpenTofu embarks on this new chapter under the CNCF, it positions itself as a robust alternative to Terraform, appealing to developers seeking open-source solutions in the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud infrastructure management.