HashiCorp's License Change Sparks the OpenTofu Fork
HashiCorp moved Terraform to the Business Source License on August 10, 2023; within six weeks, a community fork called OpenTF (soon renamed OpenTofu) had gathered 33,000 GitHub stars and joined the Linux Foundation.
HashiCorp switched Terraform’s license from the open-source Mozilla Public License v2.0 to the Business Source License (BUSL) 1.1 on August 10, 2023 — a source-available but not open-source license explicitly restricting use by direct HashiCorp competitors. Within weeks, the resulting community fork became a Linux Foundation project.
What the license change actually restricted
BUSL 1.1 permitted most existing uses to continue, but prohibited companies competing directly with HashiCorp’s own commercial offerings from incorporating, embedding, or redistributing versions of Terraform released after the change — a meaningful shift from MPL v2’s unrestricted permissions for any user, competitor or not.
The community’s fast, organized response
The reaction was unusually rapid and well-coordinated: on August 25, 2023, the “OpenTF” initiative announced its intention to fork the last MPL-licensed version of Terraform. By September 5, the fork’s manifesto repository had gathered more than 33,000 GitHub stars, with roughly 140 companies and 700 individuals publicly pledging support. On September 20, 2023, the Linux Foundation formally accepted the project, and OpenTF became OpenTofu.
What OpenTofu actually is
OpenTofu is a genuine drop-in replacement for Terraform, backward-compatible with the last open-source Terraform release (1.6) and versions before it — built specifically so existing Terraform configurations and workflows could migrate with minimal disruption, governed from the outset as a neutral, community-governed Linux Foundation project rather than controlled by any single vendor.
Why this fork happened so much faster than most
Most open-source license disputes take much longer to produce a viable, well-supported fork — OpenTofu’s speed reflected both the sheer scale of Terraform’s existing user base (motivated to act quickly to avoid being caught by a license change affecting their own tooling) and the direct availability of a neutral home (the Linux Foundation) already experienced hosting exactly this kind of community-governed infrastructure project.
Sources: OpenTofu Announces Fork of Terraform — OpenTofu, Terraform License Change (BSL) - Impact on Users & Providers — Spacelift, Manifesto — OpenTofu