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Hey! Interim tech lead of OpenTofu here. I'd like to add that as of today (announced just now at OSS Bilbao) we're officially part of the Linux Foundation[0]!

Hey! Interim tech lead of OpenTofu here. I'd like to add that as of today (announced just now at OSS Bilbao) we're officially part of the Linux Foundation[0]! Hope you like the new name (it basically won the votes anywhere it was proposed) and happy to answer any questions! [0]: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/announcing-opentofu https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/announcing-opentofu

notpushkin 3y ago
Cute punny name, I like it. Congrats on joining the LF, and keep up the good work!
- notpushkin 3y ago
  By the way, are there any plans for taking on other HashiCorp products as well? (Packer and Nomad are of particular interest to me :-)
  - echelon 3y ago
    The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad. Open Source businesses have no future in a world where big tech can gulp your product for free. The OpenTofu folks will probably even raise capital to support commercialization of their thing at some point.
    - tacticus 3y ago
      > The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad. save themselves from others building a less shit version of terraform cloud.
      - benterix 3y ago
        This will happen anyway; what they could do is to gain some time, that's all. But long-term consequences will be serious, I'm not sure if it was worth it.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      HashiCorp could pull it off, but I think moving everything to BSL overnight is just way too aggressive. I also don't think it's Amazon they are afraid of, but rather the other “cloud Terraform” providers (who unsurprisingly are the ones behind the fork). For my own project [1], I'm planning on keeping the basic edition open and maybe adding an enterprise edition later on under BSL – basically like MariaDB does. I think that's the most fair model you can do right now. [1]: https://lunni.dev/ https://lunni.dev/, a Docker Swarm dashboard
    - jnsaff2 3y ago
      Which HashiCorp OSS product is Amazon hosting for clients as part of their cloud offering? Their stuff pretty much all competes with it.
    - emptysongglass 3y ago
      I generally like your takes but this one isn't very good since it wasn't Amazon that was the threat. HashiCorp couldn't compete. Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. I worked at two companies who rejected them because their pricing was so ludicrous. The TACoS space of small startups nimbly out-competed these bad offerings. Rent-seeking because you weren't able to compete with tiny startups able to effectively value add where you didn't is a bad strategy that pisses people off. I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends. Corporations didn't seem to understand that when you participate in the OSS ecosystem you don't just get to trade on the name recognition. Or if you do, and you renege on those promises, you're going to get a lot of people very angry. So now we have companies going BSL because they didn't have a good business plan to begin with and this is their dying gasp to own the space so someone will pay them and not their much smarter, more creative, startup competitors.
      - georgyo 3y ago
        This, so much this. HashiCorp pricing just made it simply impossible to pay them. Their plan was to provide a free offering that was very good, get companies hooked, and then charge our the nose for any enterprisy feature. The problem was how they charged, which they don't reveal until after you contact sales. You could build a solution using the free offering that works very well. Then years later want something paid offerings and contact sales and find out that they charge over 1000USD per clients, and you have 1000 clients. Oops, guess I'm just going to engineer my own solution for that. 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational. It's really hard to go to management and say this open source thing we are running and serving the companies needs will now cost millions of dollars. Though I understand HashiCorp position somewhat. I'm sure their sales team has repeatedly heard that a potential client has decided they don't need the feature they called about since the free solution is good enough and can engineer around any short commons.
        Terretta 3y ago
        > 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp. Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost. At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.
    - epolanski 3y ago
      I have mixed feelings about that. Yes, doing money on open source is hard, but on the other hand, the reason why you were successful was because you were open source in the first place and capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors which would've neither contributed nor adopted your product otherwise. Imho, if you can't compete with other cloud offerings of your products then your cloud offering is weak. Competing with Amazon on prices is obviously hard, but not impossible, and it's easy to compete with them on customer service because it's your goddamn product and you should have the best expertise on it.
      - theK 3y ago
        > capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors Does this hypothesis really hold up? In my experience the contributor community remains small and often even dormant compared to the userbase of an opensource project only to take action if the project itself gets in turmoil (main developer leaves, bad takes on features etc.)
        prmoustache 3y ago
        In the case of terraform the main interesting bit is not terraform itself but the modules. What is the ratio of terraform dev vs third party dev in most popular terraform modules?
    - RobotToaster 3y ago
      Open Source businesses have no future as Open Source businesses if they aren't using Open Source licences. What I find odd in these situations, that have happened multiple times now, is the companies go straight from "weak" licenses like the MPL, straight to "source available" ones. Surely it would have been a good idea to try a strong copyleft licence like AGPL first.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        AGPL is seen as a no-go by most companies. It's viewed as risky because the obligations associated with it are often unclear.
        notpushkin 3y ago
        Surely those companies can pay for an alternative license then?
        FridgeSeal 3y ago
        I’ve had this argument with people ad infinitum; it seems some people just see “AGPL” and any further thought process just stops. “You could ask or pay for an alternate licence” or “you’re almost certainly not using this in a way that means you need to open source your entire product” and any other rational argument you can think of are just met with “yeah but agpl” and that’s apparently just the end of it.
        ghaff 3y ago
        The thing is, at that point, why not just put it under a proprietary license in the first place? Lots of companies simply don’t have AGPL on their list of legal approved open source licenses and they’re not going to change that for you. ADDED: If you want to go the dual licensing route, at least just state this up front.
        SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
- rob74 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - zkldi 3y ago
    that's on you i think. quite a lot of people enjoy tofu and it's a cute name imo.
  - FartyMcFarter 3y ago
    Not all tofu lacks texture or flavour. You have only tried the simplest version I guess.
    - rob74 3y ago
      I'm aware of smoked tofu at least, but still, if you order, let's say, an Indian dish with tofu instead of meat, you usually get the "basic" tofu version.
    - JimDabell 3y ago
      In fact stinky tofu is very common! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu
  - oldtownroad 3y ago
    most of the world loves tofu.
    - throw_pm23 3y ago
      The old "billions of flies cannot be wrong" defense.
      - sebstefan 3y ago
        the billion of flies aren't wrong if you're a fly
  - lemper 3y ago
    you need to widen your horizon more, mate.
- yuppiepuppie 3y ago
  I read it as "Open-to-fu", which could be construed in another way :)
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    Surprisingly you're not the first! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37581454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37581454
midoridensha 3y ago
"OpenTofu" is cute, but tofu has nothing to do with terraforming. How about "Genesis" or "Reliant" or "Marcus" or "Kruge"?
- joshxyz 3y ago
  it does. tofu is short for torafurm.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  As a heavy terraform user who can't wait to migrate away from Hashicorp, I don't care. It's just a name. After the first dozen uses you won't even notice, it'll be as natural as any other command.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- notpushkin 3y ago
  It's a nice pun and at the same time is close to the original, which would help Terraform users recognize the brand. Your suggestions are nice, but less recognizable in that way. Maybe we can take that pun to extreme though! If they ever have a designer that can come up with some crazy lore of terraforming with tofu that would be really really awesome. But I think they have more pressing matters right now.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    I was just hoping more HN readers would get the reference... :-(
    - jemmyw 3y ago
      I got the reference but meh I think you needed a better delivery so it was more clearly a joke
    - politelemon 3y ago
HatchedLake721 3y ago
Have you considered terrafork?
- fishnchips 3y ago
  Sure. But names including “terra” would be even more risky. Someone suggested LunarSpoon though and I personally found it hilarious.
  - joshxyz 3y ago
    yeh thats like a cereal oats brand name hahha
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      Worked well for Cap'n Proto (the cerealization protocol)! https://capnproto.org/ https://capnproto.org/
- ghomem 3y ago
  This was funny :-)
hbbio 3y ago
Will the CLI be renamed to `tofu`?
- cube2222 3y ago
  Yep!
thefilmore 3y ago
Why not OpenTransform?
- throwawayllaq 3y ago
  Wny OpenTransform?
  - hannes0 3y ago
    What?
seabass-labrax 3y ago
I'm impressed by the speed at which you've forked the project and brought up the new technical infrastructure. You mention that you are 'interim tech lead'; what does interim mean in this context, and what is the governance structure for future leadership (and presumably your replacement)? Will OpenTofu have a self-selecting board? Or will it be democratic by vote, and if so, have suffrage by membership, participation or something else? Maybe top-down BDFL appointed by the Linux Foundation? I am curious because your Manifesto states that as a result of LF stewardship the 'community governs the project'. The LF is massive, with a much more extensive portfolio than most people think, and influential far beyond its staffing would indicate. There is a great range of governance models and community norms across its projects, and, as with many things in FOSS leadership, no easy answer to the question of which the best option is among those. As tech lead, it is your responsibility to choose what model and venue OpenTofu will adopt to fulfil its promises sustainably; I hope and imagine that you have been given the authority to make these choices decisively. The stewardship of the Linux Foundation is not an automatic guarantee of success, and the resources that the LF can provide are significant, unusual in FOSS, and very difficult to use - and concerningly easy to abuse unless directed by clear leadership. I wish you all the best of luck in this challenging but exciting task, and am curious to discover how you intend to take this project forward into the future.
- cube2222 3y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! The initiative will have a steering committee composed of individuals from the main backing and involved companies and projects. As interim technical lead I'm mostly responsible for the technical side of things and getting the project up and running in this first phase. This also includes the feature development process and similar things. Interim means "until we figure out the exact details of the governance process", so a couple of weeks, most likely. Representatives of the main organizations backing the initiative are collaborating with the LF to iron out the governance model. In practice, all of this is a collaborative process among the main backers. The initial steering committee has already been selected and was to my knowledge a prerequisite to even being accepted to the LF. Currently each of the following organizations has a single seat: Gruntworks, Harness, Spacelift, env0, Scalr. There are free seats reserved for future joinees.
djha-skin 3y ago
Will there be any effort to rebrand the Hashicorp Configuration Language?
laech 3y ago
Congrats! I was hoping the icon would be the stinky variant[1], that would be so fun. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu

notpushkin 3y ago

Cute punny name, I like it. Congrats on joining the LF, and keep up the good work!

notpushkin 3y ago
By the way, are there any plans for taking on other HashiCorp products as well? (Packer and Nomad are of particular interest to me :-)
- echelon 3y ago
  The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad. Open Source businesses have no future in a world where big tech can gulp your product for free. The OpenTofu folks will probably even raise capital to support commercialization of their thing at some point.
  - tacticus 3y ago
    > The dismantling of HashiCorp because they tried to save themselves from Amazon swallowing them is sad. save themselves from others building a less shit version of terraform cloud.
    - benterix 3y ago
      This will happen anyway; what they could do is to gain some time, that's all. But long-term consequences will be serious, I'm not sure if it was worth it.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    HashiCorp could pull it off, but I think moving everything to BSL overnight is just way too aggressive. I also don't think it's Amazon they are afraid of, but rather the other “cloud Terraform” providers (who unsurprisingly are the ones behind the fork). For my own project [1], I'm planning on keeping the basic edition open and maybe adding an enterprise edition later on under BSL – basically like MariaDB does. I think that's the most fair model you can do right now. [1]: https://lunni.dev/ https://lunni.dev/, a Docker Swarm dashboard
  - jnsaff2 3y ago
    Which HashiCorp OSS product is Amazon hosting for clients as part of their cloud offering? Their stuff pretty much all competes with it.
  - emptysongglass 3y ago
    I generally like your takes but this one isn't very good since it wasn't Amazon that was the threat. HashiCorp couldn't compete. Their enterprise offerings were bad and their price quotes were insane and unrealistic. I worked at two companies who rejected them because their pricing was so ludicrous. The TACoS space of small startups nimbly out-competed these bad offerings. Rent-seeking because you weren't able to compete with tiny startups able to effectively value add where you didn't is a bad strategy that pisses people off. I shed no tears for them and their rich founder who posts tweets of his solo flights to visit his rich friends. Corporations didn't seem to understand that when you participate in the OSS ecosystem you don't just get to trade on the name recognition. Or if you do, and you renege on those promises, you're going to get a lot of people very angry. So now we have companies going BSL because they didn't have a good business plan to begin with and this is their dying gasp to own the space so someone will pay them and not their much smarter, more creative, startup competitors.
    - georgyo 3y ago
      This, so much this. HashiCorp pricing just made it simply impossible to pay them. Their plan was to provide a free offering that was very good, get companies hooked, and then charge our the nose for any enterprisy feature. The problem was how they charged, which they don't reveal until after you contact sales. You could build a solution using the free offering that works very well. Then years later want something paid offerings and contact sales and find out that they charge over 1000USD per clients, and you have 1000 clients. Oops, guess I'm just going to engineer my own solution for that. 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational. It's really hard to go to management and say this open source thing we are running and serving the companies needs will now cost millions of dollars. Though I understand HashiCorp position somewhat. I'm sure their sales team has repeatedly heard that a potential client has decided they don't need the feature they called about since the free solution is good enough and can engineer around any short commons.
      - Terretta 3y ago
        > 1 million a year buys a lot of development and operational Not all that much. At a global enterprise, for instance, that buys a couple senior systems engineers with SDLC experience after you include all the per-employee overhead that doubles their cost beyond their comp. Terraform saves the enterprise far more than that in overhead. If Terraform provides even 10% lift across 1000 seats, that's many times its cost. At a million a year, you'd need it to save you between 2 and 4 headcount to break even, not counting the compliance/audit/security benefits.
  - epolanski 3y ago
    I have mixed feelings about that. Yes, doing money on open source is hard, but on the other hand, the reason why you were successful was because you were open source in the first place and capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors which would've neither contributed nor adopted your product otherwise. Imho, if you can't compete with other cloud offerings of your products then your cloud offering is weak. Competing with Amazon on prices is obviously hard, but not impossible, and it's easy to compete with them on customer service because it's your goddamn product and you should have the best expertise on it.
    - theK 3y ago
      > capitalized on millions of hours of free work from unpaid contributors Does this hypothesis really hold up? In my experience the contributor community remains small and often even dormant compared to the userbase of an opensource project only to take action if the project itself gets in turmoil (main developer leaves, bad takes on features etc.)
      - prmoustache 3y ago
        In the case of terraform the main interesting bit is not terraform itself but the modules. What is the ratio of terraform dev vs third party dev in most popular terraform modules?
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    Open Source businesses have no future as Open Source businesses if they aren't using Open Source licences. What I find odd in these situations, that have happened multiple times now, is the companies go straight from "weak" licenses like the MPL, straight to "source available" ones. Surely it would have been a good idea to try a strong copyleft licence like AGPL first.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      AGPL is seen as a no-go by most companies. It's viewed as risky because the obligations associated with it are often unclear.
      - notpushkin 3y ago
        Surely those companies can pay for an alternative license then?
        FridgeSeal 3y ago
        I’ve had this argument with people ad infinitum; it seems some people just see “AGPL” and any further thought process just stops. “You could ask or pay for an alternate licence” or “you’re almost certainly not using this in a way that means you need to open source your entire product” and any other rational argument you can think of are just met with “yeah but agpl” and that’s apparently just the end of it.
        ghaff 3y ago
        The thing is, at that point, why not just put it under a proprietary license in the first place? Lots of companies simply don’t have AGPL on their list of legal approved open source licenses and they’re not going to change that for you. ADDED: If you want to go the dual licensing route, at least just state this up front.
        SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
rob74 3y ago
[flagged]
- zkldi 3y ago
  that's on you i think. quite a lot of people enjoy tofu and it's a cute name imo.
- FartyMcFarter 3y ago
  Not all tofu lacks texture or flavour. You have only tried the simplest version I guess.
  - rob74 3y ago
    I'm aware of smoked tofu at least, but still, if you order, let's say, an Indian dish with tofu instead of meat, you usually get the "basic" tofu version.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    In fact stinky tofu is very common! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu
- oldtownroad 3y ago
  most of the world loves tofu.
  - throw_pm23 3y ago
    The old "billions of flies cannot be wrong" defense.
    - sebstefan 3y ago
      the billion of flies aren't wrong if you're a fly
- lemper 3y ago
  you need to widen your horizon more, mate.
yuppiepuppie 3y ago
I read it as "Open-to-fu", which could be construed in another way :)
- notpushkin 3y ago
  Surprisingly you're not the first! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37581454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37581454

midoridensha 3y ago

"OpenTofu" is cute, but tofu has nothing to do with terraforming. How about "Genesis" or "Reliant" or "Marcus" or "Kruge"?

joshxyz 3y ago
it does. tofu is short for torafurm.
INTPenis 3y ago
As a heavy terraform user who can't wait to migrate away from Hashicorp, I don't care. It's just a name. After the first dozen uses you won't even notice, it'll be as natural as any other command.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
notpushkin 3y ago
It's a nice pun and at the same time is close to the original, which would help Terraform users recognize the brand. Your suggestions are nice, but less recognizable in that way. Maybe we can take that pun to extreme though! If they ever have a designer that can come up with some crazy lore of terraforming with tofu that would be really really awesome. But I think they have more pressing matters right now.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  I was just hoping more HN readers would get the reference... :-(
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    I got the reference but meh I think you needed a better delivery so it was more clearly a joke
  - politelemon 3y ago

HatchedLake721 3y ago

Have you considered terrafork?

fishnchips 3y ago
Sure. But names including “terra” would be even more risky. Someone suggested LunarSpoon though and I personally found it hilarious.
- joshxyz 3y ago
  yeh thats like a cereal oats brand name hahha
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    Worked well for Cap'n Proto (the cerealization protocol)! https://capnproto.org/ https://capnproto.org/
ghomem 3y ago
This was funny :-)

hbbio 3y ago

Will the CLI be renamed to `tofu`?

cube2222 3y ago
Yep!

thefilmore 3y ago

Why not OpenTransform?

throwawayllaq 3y ago
Wny OpenTransform?
- hannes0 3y ago
  What?

seabass-labrax 3y ago

I'm impressed by the speed at which you've forked the project and brought up the new technical infrastructure. You mention that you are 'interim tech lead'; what does interim mean in this context, and what is the governance structure for future leadership (and presumably your replacement)? Will OpenTofu have a self-selecting board? Or will it be democratic by vote, and if so, have suffrage by membership, participation or something else? Maybe top-down BDFL appointed by the Linux Foundation? I am curious because your Manifesto states that as a result of LF stewardship the 'community governs the project'. The LF is massive, with a much more extensive portfolio than most people think, and influential far beyond its staffing would indicate. There is a great range of governance models and community norms across its projects, and, as with many things in FOSS leadership, no easy answer to the question of which the best option is among those. As tech lead, it is your responsibility to choose what model and venue OpenTofu will adopt to fulfil its promises sustainably; I hope and imagine that you have been given the authority to make these choices decisively. The stewardship of the Linux Foundation is not an automatic guarantee of success, and the resources that the LF can provide are significant, unusual in FOSS, and very difficult to use - and concerningly easy to abuse unless directed by clear leadership. I wish you all the best of luck in this challenging but exciting task, and am curious to discover how you intend to take this project forward into the future.

cube2222 3y ago
Thanks for the kind words! The initiative will have a steering committee composed of individuals from the main backing and involved companies and projects. As interim technical lead I'm mostly responsible for the technical side of things and getting the project up and running in this first phase. This also includes the feature development process and similar things. Interim means "until we figure out the exact details of the governance process", so a couple of weeks, most likely. Representatives of the main organizations backing the initiative are collaborating with the LF to iron out the governance model. In practice, all of this is a collaborative process among the main backers. The initial steering committee has already been selected and was to my knowledge a prerequisite to even being accepted to the LF. Currently each of the following organizations has a single seat: Gruntworks, Harness, Spacelift, env0, Scalr. There are free seats reserved for future joinees.

djha-skin 3y ago

Will there be any effort to rebrand the Hashicorp Configuration Language?

laech 3y ago

Congrats! I was hoping the icon would be the stinky variant[1], that would be so fun. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu