OpenTofu 1.6: the open source Terraform fork reaches general availability

2024-01-10 · Publisher : OpenTofu (Linux Foundation) · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

On 10 January 2024, OpenTofu ships its first stable release (1.6). The Terraform fork, hosted by the Linux Foundation, was born after HashiCorp moved to the BSL licence and positions itself as a drop-in replacement.

### Background On 10 January 2024, the OpenTofu project announces general availability of version 1.6, four months after the fork was created. OpenTofu was born in August 2023, when HashiCorp moved Terraform from the MPL licence to the Business Source License (BSL). Terraform remains free for end users, but the BSL forbids building a competing product from its code. OpenTofu stays under a permissive licence and under Linux Foundation governance. ### Key facts - Four months of development, more than sixty developers, hundreds of contributors across five continents (figures from the press release). - New features: a testing feature for configurations and modules, an improved S3 backend (new authentication methods), hundreds of fixes and performance improvements. - A new provider and module registry, described by the project as ten times faster and ten times cheaper to run (project claim). - Roadmap announced for 1.7: client-side state encryption, parameterizable backends and modules, a plugin system. ### Why it matters For a consulting firm, the key point is reversibility: since OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement for Terraform, a team can switch its infrastructure-as-code engine without rewriting its configurations. The topic shifts from technical to contractual: licence and governance become selection criteria for a pipeline tool, alongside features. Clients concerned about vendor lock-in now have a credible alternative. ### Takeaway First step of a lasting split of the Terraform ecosystem between a vendor tool under BSL and a community fork under neutral governance.

Tags : Infrastructure as Code, Open Source, Licence, DevOps