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I have no horse in the race, but as an outside observer, and involved in some small open source stuff, I find it interesting the dynamics of these kinds of larg

I have no horse in the race, but as an outside observer, and involved in some small open source stuff, I find it interesting the dynamics of these kinds of large public events and forks. Looking at the contributor activity from Aug 13th 2023 to today, there seems to be slightly less activity in the OpenTofu repo vs the original Terraform repo, but small sample size and just eyeballing it, don't take this as an accurate statement. I wonder how viable this fork will end up being. To contrast with the recent Redis debacle, Redis is by some measure a completed piece of software, as suggested by the Redict fork. But with the moving target of the Cloud, is Terraform in a similar bucket? Will there be enough support behind this fork 5 years from now? And by support I don't mean is some big tech company's logo displayed on the website - are there multiple contributors or is it some random person in Nebraska doing what they can during evenings and weekends? Might be an unfair comparison, but I'm reminded of the Reddit API uproar last year. It did what exactly? Reddit IPO'd, got their cake, the people who threw up their arms got what? Some maybe left, others just quietly returned to their corners of Reddit and continued using it? Will these large publicity forks end up being healthy and viable or end up open-source abandonware that once promised the world? To be clear, I'm all for competition, FOSS, and all the stuff. I just genuinely worry about big bang, high publicity stuff. Is it big bang and then a quiet whimper, or a self sustaining entity for the long term?

sdesol 3y ago
> slightly less activity in the OpenTofu repo vs the original Terraform repo, There is actually quite a bit of difference in activity level, if you consider unique people engaging with both projects. In the last 30 days, Terraform had 205 unique users interact with their repo vs 62 for OpenTofu [1]. [1] https://devboard.gitsense.com/opentofu?id=82c4b68df1&nb=all https://devboard.gitsense.com/opentofu?id=82c4b68df1&nb=all Edit: If you only consider people with merges, then the activity level is very similar https://devboard.gitsense.com/opentofu?id=82c4b68df1&nb=all&prs=merged&files=merged&comments=ignore&issues=ignore https://devboard.gitsense.com/opentofu?id=82c4b68df1&nb=all&... Note 1: Full disclosure, this is my tool Note 2: You can't read too much into the trending insights for now, since I need to spread the API limit across many repos, so I only go back so far for each repo.
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
I think comparing number of contributors is not the point here. I would not be surprised if Hashicorp can put more people on their proprietary heavily modified version, and it will be more advanced. Yet the Open Source version can be good enough, and prefered for 95% of folks out there
- historynops 3y ago
  My question is, how do Env0, Spacelift, and other Terraform automation and collaboration tool vendors make money if they make OpenTofu so good that it's preferred for 95% of folks out there? Do they fight over the support money scraps?
  - fishnchips 3y ago
    Git being better does not make GitHub bankrupt. They operate on different layers.
  - sausagefeet 3y ago
    Env0, Spacelift, and (my company) Terrateam compete with Terraform Cloud not Terraform. Terraform and OpenTofu are CLIs that turn HCL code into living infrastructure. The business model of these offerings, including TFC, is to provide the layer most organizations need above that, such as collaboration, interfacing with VCS, etc.

sdesol 3y ago

> slightly less activity in the OpenTofu repo vs the original Terraform repo, There is actually quite a bit of difference in activity level, if you consider unique people engaging with both projects. In the last 30 days, Terraform had 205 unique users interact with their repo vs 62 for OpenTofu [1]. [1] https://devboard.gitsense.com/opentofu?id=82c4b68df1&nb=all https://devboard.gitsense.com/opentofu?id=82c4b68df1&nb=all Edit: If you only consider people with merges, then the activity level is very similar https://devboard.gitsense.com/opentofu?id=82c4b68df1&nb=all&prs=merged&files=merged&comments=ignore&issues=ignore https://devboard.gitsense.com/opentofu?id=82c4b68df1&nb=all&... Note 1: Full disclosure, this is my tool Note 2: You can't read too much into the trending insights for now, since I need to spread the API limit across many repos, so I only go back so far for each repo.

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

I think comparing number of contributors is not the point here. I would not be surprised if Hashicorp can put more people on their proprietary heavily modified version, and it will be more advanced. Yet the Open Source version can be good enough, and prefered for 95% of folks out there

historynops 3y ago
My question is, how do Env0, Spacelift, and other Terraform automation and collaboration tool vendors make money if they make OpenTofu so good that it's preferred for 95% of folks out there? Do they fight over the support money scraps?
- fishnchips 3y ago
  Git being better does not make GitHub bankrupt. They operate on different layers.
- sausagefeet 3y ago
  Env0, Spacelift, and (my company) Terrateam compete with Terraform Cloud not Terraform. Terraform and OpenTofu are CLIs that turn HCL code into living infrastructure. The business model of these offerings, including TFC, is to provide the layer most organizations need above that, such as collaboration, interfacing with VCS, etc.