 All right, everyone, welcome to the Open Tofu Community Q&A. I'm very excited to be here. This is my sixth time in Japan. I'm still very happy to come every single time. And it's a pleasure to be here with all of you. So this is meant to be a community Q&A. So I'm gonna start by presenting a little bit about the project, the folks behind it, White Matters, all of that. And then after that, we've got some time for any questions you guys might have, any discussion you might want to have. So this is kind of a rough outline that we'll be going through. One important part to start with is what the heck is Open Tofu? Hopefully, most people here know what it is. But if not, we'll go over it a little bit. Then talking about White Matters, the progress we've made so far, what was behind the project, how to get started, how to contribute, and all of that. Just two little things before we start. I left you guys some stickers on the chair, so feel free to take those. They're super cute. Very happy to have distributed them. And second thing is, I also wanna just state that I'm a huge fan of HashiCorp, very grateful for what Mitchell has done for the community. Many, many great open source projects, or formerly open source projects. I'm a big fan of Terraforum, and I strongly hope that they will join us in the Linux Foundation with their projects in the future. Don't know if that'll happen, but I'm still crossing my fingers. All right, so let's get started. So a little bit about me. I'm Sebastian Stadel. I'm one of the core contributors of Open Tofu. I'm also the CEO of a company called Scaler that builds tools on top of Open Tofu. And finally, I'm a guest lecturer at Carnegie Mellon on topics of entrepreneurship, technology, and whatever else they want me to talk about. So first of all, what is Open Tofu besides the project with the silliest name? You might have seen this meme on Twitter or circulating. And once we'll go over it, it'll make a lot more sense. But essentially, Open Tofu, it's an open source continuation of Terraforum. So Terraforum used to be an open source project. Sadly, it no longer is. Some people say it's an open-ish source project. Some people say it's closed source. I'm on the side of saying it's closed source, but it doesn't really matter. And along with a lot of other folks in the community, we decided that we would continue the project. So just really quickly, this is kind of what Open Tofu is like or Terraforum is like. It's a declarative model for writing code that's gonna manage your infrastructure. So you can see here, this is for Amazon EC2, this is how you write code that's going to manage your EC2 machines. In this case here, I think it's a T2 micro. But I'm showing this so that you get kind of a picture for those of you who are a little bit new of what we're talking about. All right, so this goes a little bit back to why we started, why we forked Terraforum and why we contributed to the Linux Foundation. So we believe, and we put out a manifesto and like all this is public information, but we believe that Terraforum is a little bit more than just a software project. It's used as a language. That's really, really important. And because it's used as a language, a lot of organizations have built amazing things on top of it. And so as a foundation for a lot of important things, it's just way too important to be in the hands of a single entity. And so when Hashicorp decided that they would no longer have Terraforum be open source, the way we saw that is it's not just a product that was being closed source. It's the foundation for how a lot of millions of folks deploy and manage all of their cloud resources and increasingly their configurations for Datadog, for DNS, and for just the host of other things. And so it's a foundation for a lot of things. And because a lot of organizations that were using Terraforum, sometimes we compete, sometimes we collaborate, the Linux Foundation provided a great home, a great place for a neutral grounds for all of us to be able to build this project. So I don't know how many of you are familiar with the whole incubation to graduation process, but you have to have five, a minimum of five organizations that contribute to a project before it can graduate. We were almost a dozen when we started out, so we went through the whole incubation process very, very quickly. And now Open Tofu is a full project of under the Linux Foundation. A little bit of on the timeline, this all went so fast. It's crazy the thing that this is just a few months old. So August 10, Hashicorp decides that Terraforum would no longer be open source, and they re-licensed, so they announced that they would license future versions of Terraforum under what's called the business source license. If you don't know what it is, it's essentially a license that says that you're not allowed to use, make production use of Terraforum, so you're not allowed to use Terraforum in production unless you qualify under some special exemptions. And those special exemptions are a little bit vague. And so if you work in a big organization, you don't know whether you can use Terraforum in production or not. And you don't know if, and maybe you are, maybe you think you are allowed to use it today, that does not give you a guarantee you'll be able to use it in the future. So we all got in there, in the open source community, we all got very alarmed. And so we published a, no, four days later. Those were crazy four days. We got together, we all discussed what our beliefs were, and our commitment to open source. And we drafted and published a manifesto that expressed our beliefs and our views and our desires and why it is incredibly important for the project to live on in an open source manner. We did a little over a week for some response from them. Sadly, did not get a response. And so we went forward with a fork and published that on September 5th is when we had the first kind of publish of the repository. And then in fast forward a couple of weeks from then, so barely a month over since it got closed source, we were in Bilbao at the open source summits and announced that to open tofu was joined as part of the Linux Foundation. And happy to announce that, I know a lot of people have been waiting for this. On December 15th, we will have the first release candidates. So we will finally be able to use that and start migrating and replacing legacy Terraform with it. Cute logo, I know. By the way, a little parenthesis. I've loved playing around with the little tofu icon and you'll see that shortly. So since we announced that on the 20th, open tofu has been one of the fastest growing communities on GitHub and by all sorts of different metrics. 16,000 stars on GitHub. There's now 57 committers and 500 commits in the last couple months across developers in four different continents. The speed of development is only accelerating. We've merged 340 PRs for merging 15 a week. Those numbers are growing as we're preparing for a release and for ongoing development. As we are nearing, so that's 10 days from now. As we're nearing the RISC candidates, a lot of folks have been on Twitter and otherwise asking us what's the best way to get started, what's the best way to contribute. Let me start with the contribution portion. Like any open source project, it thrives on the size and involvement and engagement of the community. This is no exception and we have a lot of folks that are waiting on bug reports, waiting on ideas, waiting on engagement, just to figure out how to help you guys. A very, very important portion of all this is also just evangelizing. I'm here, you guys are here because we all believe in open source and one of the most powerful things that we can do is just getting more folks to use open tofu and to switch over from Terraform for it. There's already a lot of folks contributing to the project. If you want to submit a patch, that's awesome, but obviously not necessary. Right now the most important thing is just the evangelization and helping the community grow. All right, so there's two parts here that I would like to go into a little bit more depth. The first thing is if you are, can I get a quick show of hands who here has used Terraform in some capacity? Okay, that's like 75%, that's great. So this section here is mostly for us folks. The easiest way to think about this is in any sort of large organization you've got a distribution of projects that you might be using 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 versions of Terraform. If you are on any version that is earlier than 1.5, 0.7, then open tofu is not relevant to you yet. Just keep upgrading those projects until you get to the latest and last open source version of Terraform. Once you get to 1.5, 0.7, that's when you want to migrate and switch over. As you normally would to Terraform 1.6, that's when you would move to open tofu. If, and obviously if you're starting a new project, instead of starting it on closed source Terraform or legacy Terraform, strongly encourage starting that project on open tofu. And then the last part of this is that we've made a commitment to maintain compatibility for as long as we possibly can. And what that means is that open tofu is a drop in replacement for Terraform. So that means in any of your projects that would be otherwise on Terraform 1.6, you just start using open tofu and everything will work as is. For later versions of legacy Terraform, 1.7, the alpha's out. We will continue for as long as we can to maintain that and to make a drop in. So that in an organization, you can have some teams, some projects that use open tofu and that can co-live with Terraform so that you can migrate at your own velocity. The workflow kind of looks like this. Obviously it's much easier to comprehend that way. So upgrading to open tofu's once you get to 1.5.7, if so long as you're there, as long as it's open source, just continue upgrading Terraform open source. But if you're starting in your project, just go ahead and start that with open tofu. Now for the 25% of us that have not used Terraform yet, the reasons for using open tofu are the same reasons for using infrastructure as code in general. Your code's going to be Mormon to maintainable. It's going to be more readable. Open Tofu provides you with a much better abstraction for thinking about resources and collaborating on resources than CloudFormation or even from Chef and other things used for provisioning. And there's a very fast and very helpful community of resources and folks that are there to help with all that. So if you're not using infrastructure as code today, strongly recommend moving in that direction and open tofu is a great place to go from zero to one. So what's next? After the December 15 release, we think we should be able to have the, graduate that release candidates into a stable GA release on December 20th. Obviously it's the Christmas period, so we might decide that we want to postpone that a little bit. But after that, there's going to be a very rapid succession of improvements, bug fixes, et cetera. And the 1.6 version of Terraform with the first version of open tofu will maintain parity that way. Going forward for as long as we possibly can, open tofu will be a drop in replacements. And so that means as for your projects, there's just a few places where you'll need to update some names, but otherwise the binaries are going to be very similar and the effort involved in replacements is very easy. And the last thing is if you go to GitHub, go to open tofu and go to issues, there's a ton of great ideas there. We are in the process of going through all of those to figure out what we would want. And so we'll publish in the future kind of what our plans are with all of those. But the first priority is that it's a drop in fully compatible replacements. And then over the long term, we will add things that Terraform might not have. And so over the long term, it'll be a faster, higher-velocity, better project as we draw from the innovation from the entire community. All right, so let's move on to the Q&A section. There's three questions that we very frequently get, so I will just kind of ask those of myself and answer them. But the first question that we very often get is are the folks from open tofu, are we going to fork all the providers? And the answer is we don't have to. The providers are still licensed under an open source license. There's some like the most frequently used providers there under the Hashicorp repo. And so we fork that so that we can create a registry so that we can provide continued support for all those providers. But the development that happens in those providers, the developer, as well as all of them, is pretty much done by the vendor behind that provider. So most of the work on the AWS provider is done by AWS employees. Most of the work done on the Datadog provider is done by Datadog employees. And so there's really no problem there. And we're also working with some other organizations on figuring out what would be some good standards to have for providers for the long term. But there's no need to fork any of the providers, other than just for the registry's own needs. And so there's no problem there. Another question we frequently get is for the Terraform 1.7 alpha. So aside from some issues of legal issues of patents being filed, et cetera, as so far as we know, we will be able to have a drop-in replacement for 1.7 as well. And so work on that is underway in some places. We will have more clarity over that as we get to understand a little bit more of the direction that 1.7 is going in. And the last thing is, the last question we frequently get is whether there's going to be other forks, whether we are going to be forking other of Hasakorps closed source projects. The answer is we as an open-s fork tofu community are not. We are focused 100% on keeping the spirit of Terraform alive in open-tofu. But there are some projects underway for forking some of their other projects. And OpenVowel, for example, is one such project. There's a project part of the Linux Foundation that's now incubating. And incubating meaning it's going through the Linux Foundation's process for maturing. And so if you use Vault today, then you can consider joining the community for OpenVowel and helping folks out there to graduate that. So before we move on to the last little parts, do we have any questions? Hard ones, easy ones? Go for it. Michael, different direction. I think the providers let me that at some point they will be incompatible with open-tofu. Yeah, great question. So the question is what happens if the provide, if Hasakorps maintains and decides to go in a different direction for the provider. So it would be, first of all, the only provider that Hasakorps makes that where they have complete control over is Hasakorps own provider for Terraform or the ones for Vault, et cetera. And so those are the ones that it has complete control over. They can do whatever they want with that. It's not really as relevant. For the providers, for all of the big cloud providers as well as the big software vendors, DataDog and a few others, those, they're still open source licensed and the makers of those providers are not Hasakorps, right? The makers are AWS, Google and Oracle and all of those. It's, we're working with them, but it's in their interest to have the work that they do with the provider be compatible with open-tofu, with Pulumi is another one and Terraform itself. And so maybe in the future, the entire world would decide that to go in the proprietary close source direction, I don't think that's gonna happen. And so we're not concerns of that happening. And that's why we're working on some standards so that we can agree on how the work on a provider would look like so that we can guarantee ongoing compatibility for all of the projects built on that interact with those providers. Very question. Go for it. Hi, I work at Sakura Internet, which is a local cloud provider. And I'm the one working on the Terraform provider for Sakura Cloud. And my question is that right now, because of the license change in regards to Terraform, we're having to freeze our Terraform version. And we're in the process of thinking about whether we want to switch to open-tofu or pay to use Terraform. And at the end of the day, because as much as I personally believe in open-source, at the end of the day, in enterprise, it's a new project. So it's very difficult to gauge whether this project would actually continue on forward. And also there's the added fear that while open-tofu says that it will be fully compatible with Terraform, at the end of the day, because we have to work on the Terraform provider as well. If open-tofu starts adding new features and stuff like that, we're gonna have to support the Terraform provider and the open-tofu provider as well. So from our point of view, it's added work. And also from our customer's point of view, it's very difficult to gauge whether open-tofu has the actual longevity that would net us for to actually consider switching over to open-tofu. So my question is that, first of all, where's the incentive for us to start using open-tofu right now rather than maybe wait a year or two and see where the project goes? And also from a provider developer point of view, will it be in such a way that we can continue working on the Terraform provider and it will still drop in work with open-tofu in the future? Fantastic question. So first of all, there's only one provider. So if you make a provider for your product, that will work with open-tofu and that will work with Terraform. And in such case, where some interfaces might change, we're committed to working and to changing, ensuring that open-tofu continues to work with all of the providers out there. So that's kind of what we mean by compatibility. In terms of longevity, one of the very, very cool things about the Linux Foundation is it provides a really good framework for long-term success, long-term project success. And so one of the requirements is having a technical steering committee to resolve disagreements between committers or between folks working on the project. Another one is to ensure that there are enough separate organizations contributing to the project to make sure that it's not beholden on like one or two or a small number of projects. Of the 57 folks that have made contributions in the last couple months, I don't know exactly what the distribution of that is, but there's a large number of folks that are not, that are just like, I think Linus was talking about that earlier, where there's a lot of folks that come in that make one or two patches and then there's like a core amount of folks that contribute on a regular basis. And so how that makes changes over time, don't really know. But now that there's several dozen people that have contributed to the project in a manner or another, that does provide a fair amount of redundancy to make sure the project persists. And then over the long-term, like what's the incentive? Personally, I believe that open communities tend to out-innovate commercial proprietary small groups. That's not always the case, but most of the time it is. And so if you subscribe to that belief, then the best ideas from people all over the world, then the incentive is that this is a project that will eventually be not just a drop in replacement, but an entirely superior option, besides just the licensing issues. And then like as a very, that's another side note, there's also just the philosophical point, which I strongly believe in open source. And if there are two projects that are identical and one's open source and one's not, I personally believe that the moral choice is to use the open source project and help in some manner. Hopefully, I know my answer was a little bit long. Hopefully that, did I answer everything? Yeah, that answered my question. I have one small question. Are there any big organizations or corporations that are currently believing in Open Tofu and how do you say it like going to contribute or currently contributing to the project? Excellent question. I can't speak for any of the large organizations. I've been specifically told not to make any announcements of what some of those big organizations are doing. But there's two things I can recommend. One, go to the project, go to all the committers, look at the companies that those committers work at, and you'll get an answer to your question. And then in addition to that, I'll kind of give you a little bit of a, because I can't answer directly your question, but I can kind of give you a little bit of context. If you think about the big cloud providers, Amazon and Fujitsu Cloud, and they really do not have an incentive, they really don't like not being in control of the user experience that their customers have, right? And so you can imagine a world in which, let's say you're a big cloud provider, starting with an A. You might not be in love with the idea that the developer experience that your customers are having depends on an organization that is not aligned with your own organization. And so these big cloud providers, they wanna be as close to the customer as possible. And because of that, that's why they started contributing to the providers themselves. And that's also a reason why they want to see Open Tofu succeed. And so while I can't say anything publicly, in the next six to 12 months, that landscape is gonna change quite a bit. Thank you, that answers my question. I know I was like tapping and dancing around the issue, but hopefully that gives enough context around it. Thank you. You bet. Hey, thanks for this. This has been really interesting. I used to use Terraform more in a previous role I had at my last company, and actually I brought it into our company, and so it's very near and dear to my heart. My question is about the partnership that you continue to have with HashiCorp. So there are a lot of different reasons that companies that made something originally open source will kind of pull back from that. And I appreciate that they may not be pulling back from the open source community per se, but does the reasons, or at least your sensibility for the reasons that they've made the business decision that they have to not support this, which is kind of, you know, propelled open tofu for? Yeah. Do you feel that that is indicative of a suboptimal partnership that you'll have with HashiCorp going forward over this, be it more maybe contentious, or is it something that you think that they did as purely a business decision that they feel that they have sufficient differentiators to not be threatened by the asynchronous development of this in the open source community? Have you ever seen that? Yeah. Wonderful question. And this is recorded, so I need to be very careful what I say. So the official party line is that Terraform as a language, vital to the internet. And as such, we have wanted it to be donated to the Linux Foundation for a very long time. And the re-licensing to the BSL provides this great opportunity to be like, okay, well, let's gather together. Everybody who wanted Terraform to be open, to be in a neutral foundation to begin with, and let's get those folks to work on open tofu. And if HashiCorp in the future wants to join us at open tofu, we would be thrilled to see that happen. Obviously I can't speculate to the internal reasons that HashiCorp has made. I love the work that Mitchell has done and continues to do on other projects and I'm immensely grateful for that. They actually have their earnings call in two days, so it'll be super interesting to see the effects of all of this. But I think in the last couple earnings calls, they're still burning money at, I think like $200 million a year, something like that. And so if I was at the head of that, in a world where interest rates are rising and folks want to see a faster return on cash being generated, I can see a lot of pressure for wanting to burn less money and to try to extract more faster from the community. And then if I take my open tofu contributor hat off and put my scalar CEO hat on, what we've seen is the whole reason why my company is building on top of open tofu and has in the past built on top of Terraform is because we have not seen HashiCorp execute well enough on Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise. Those products have immense potential and there's immense potential for building great collaborative tools on top of open tofu, on top of Terraform. And it didn't seem like they are executing very quickly on that. And so that's why there's been a number of organizations that have appeared to fill in some of those gaps. And so I think like from wearing that not open tofu contributor hat on, I think one of the problems that they have is they haven't been executing fast enough on their commercial projects. And sadly, because of that, they feel the need to kind of do a rug pull on the community to compensate for that. Again, just speculation. I do want to reiterate that I'm very grateful for all the work that Mitchell and the HashiCorp folks have done to date. Obviously a split community is never a great thing. We, with all our hearts, all of us welcome them into the Linux Foundation umbrella and we would love to collaborate with them in the future. And that would be the best outcome of all of this. But in the meantime, we all believe in open source and we believe in that. And then there's a great opportunity to build commercial projects on top of that as many, many companies have now proven from gruntworks to Scala, to Spacelift and then Zero and Terramate and a host of other ones. If you have a follow-up, go for it. No, no, no, I think that, I mean, so what I'm hearing is that the, I guess maybe just to kind of drill to the salient point, the commitment from, at least from your perspective, with your tofu hat, back on now, tofu hat and some weird things to say out loud. That commitment from them to collaborate deeply with you on this fork is not quite where you want it to be yet. Yeah, correct. I think they would, I think they strongly wish that we did not rally the community around preserving open source. That being said, I do know that there are plenty of folks at HashiCorp that believe in open source and want and disagree with the decisions that have been made by the HashiCorp leadership. I don't want to go into that territory too much. We, like the best possible outcome of all of this is the communities join under the Linux Foundation and instead of having a split effort that we all join and collaborate together on one project. And I'm opt, you know, one of the things that Jim was talking about this morning is hopeful, right? I am hopeful that in the future that HashiCorp will realize that it is in their financial best interests to have an open source foundation that they collaborate with everyone on. And that there's still a great opportunity for them to build commercial projects on an open source base. That might require leadership change on their side. I don't know. And I would rather not speculate on that. Go for it. Thanks a lot. Where does the name come from? So, it's compatibility is really, really important to us. And that also meant preserving the TF kind of shortcuts. Now if you want to like the open tofu, if you want to alias that to something closer to what you'd be familiar with, go for it. So that was kind of one of the main reasons. And then, well, that's actually a good segue. And then like, look at all these cute icons we can make with the tofu logo. So, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Yeah, I'm gonna make stickers of all of these. So if you guys want stickers, just email me and I'll mail some of those stickers. But like once, I know Open Tofu originally was a weird name, but it kind of grew on us. But what really convinced us is how love, like how much opportunity this gives us to make good, fun marketing out of it. And so I had a lot of fun making these, yeah. Yeah. I guess I kind of went through those last few slides real quick, but yeah, one last question. Yeah, so I believe you mentioned in your slides that Open Tofu is in comparison to Terraform, more maintainable, more readable and has better abstractions, can you elaborate? Oh, sorry, that was meant if you're currently not using Terraform or Open Tofu, then the reason for moving from nothing to, or from CloudFormation or from to those projects is they're like infrastructure code is more maintainable, more readable, et cetera. All right. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Follow-up question, do you have any grandiose plans to make Open Tofu better than Terraform in some technical respect? Yes, this is, I think I was saying a little bit earlier that I strongly believe that Open Communities and just tend to out innovate. I don't think any of us, one of us, and certainly not myself, have better ideas or will be able to by ourselves make something better, but provided that rule number one compatibility is for as long as we possibly can, and but that doesn't mean we can't have, if we see great ideas from the community, it doesn't mean that we can't have extensions or other capabilities. That does mean that if we add a capability and you start using it, that means that moving back to Terraform, I don't know why you'd wanna do that, but that would be, if you're using that capability, it just makes it harder. But we, I think Marston from SpaceLift is putting some thought into this. Don't know when he'll, when we'll blog about it, but we are putting together some thoughts or guidelines on how we want, so the problem behind the problem here is that there have been over the last many, many years lots of ideas that have been pitched to Terraform, to the HashiCorp folks, that have not made their way into the project because it competes with HashiCorp's commercial projects. Now we, like OpenTofu doesn't have those misalignments, and so we do want to be able to leverage the fact that it's neutral in order to incorporate some of those community ideas. I think maybe in the next couple of months, look for a blog post on that topic on what our plans are for incorporating, like building stuff that should have been in Terraform but never made it in. Great question. Thank you. You guys have been an incredible group. Those were some very good questions. Thank you so much for caring about the community and joining us here. Thank you.