 Hi, this is your host up to Bhartya and we are here at open source summit in Bilbois, Spain And today we have with us Sebastian is a little core contributor to the open tofu project Sebastian is great to have you on the show great to be here and this is going to be an interesting discussion and It can go in so many different directions But we'll try to focus on one core constituent that I really care about is users and customers You know folks companies they do a lot of things over the whole life cycle But I would avoid going there we will talk about that briefly, but the focus will be more about open tofu What you folks are doing? What is the goal? So before we get into the the whole announcement that was made yesterday, let's start with the problem area What did Hashikar do that led to creation of first? Open TF that you're involved with that project and then open to food. Let's start the problem area first Yeah, so first of all, we're immensely grateful Everyone at open tofu is incredibly grateful For all the work that Mitchell and and Armin and Hashikarp has made Vault is amazing terraforms amazing all the products that they've they've released over the years are just groundbreaking amazing products and it's we're incredibly Incredibly grateful as well that those products started out as an as open source products So we're incredibly grateful for all of the work that they've done up to now and incredibly grateful for terraform and all the products For reasons that we don't That that we perhaps don't quite agree with but that are within entirely within their rights They decided to stop the stop the products from being open source and they're now under a business source license And so with the community we decided that we we believed in in the future of the product Strongly enough that we wanted to continue an open source path for terraform And so with the community we got together and we made a fork under the MPL license that fork is called open tofu and It's also under the MPL and it continues just As is we are seeing this trend, you know recently we're Companies they start off with open source license Large communities built around that it's not just a community of developers contributor But all the users who rely and depend on it and then suddenly they decide to change the license leaving The whole ecosystem high and dry. How worried are you about that this trend? I say moderately But but overall not it's just been incredibly humbling to see the speed at which the community got together and Made a viable fork of terraform It's just hard to believe that just five weeks ago They re-licensed the their products to no longer be open source in five weeks. We've been able to get together I think it's something like 800 developers 150 organizations. We got 41,000 stars on kid hub We got enterprises small businesses individual contributors Involved and and now we're part of the it's part of the Linux foundation and it's just five weeks is incredibly compressed timeline to achieve all that and they wouldn't be possible if it if it weren't for all the other faith and the the the fervor in in open source in general and and so it's it's to answer a question Yeah, there are some elements that are worrying but but I think overall it's just open source communities are very powerful and and I Don't think it's a good idea to to to try to screw over our community Remember before the interview started I was talking I used to be a big fan of Michael Freighton in Jurassic Park in life He wrote that live finds way the open source community, you know finds it big and so same I know I find a new term that open source, you know, I always find so very yeah I was talking right and also the larger community that you build around your product and product the hard It will be to turn that product and project into proprietary because the community will come in and yes, it is really impressive that the community, you know came together and You know with that first open DF and then open tofu does that also sends a message to these these companies? You know sometimes, you know, I don't want to once again get into a reason Very strong message that no This is not the right way to start with open source If you really want to start with the proprietary software code Nobody has a problem with that but it's starting with open source building But do you think that this will also send a message to a lot of other companies who might be thinking because overall It is bad for the ecosystem is bad for the customer and it also bad for the whole venture capitalists all the startups as well I kind of think about it this way. There are really three pillars to strong vibrant open source products You have to have an open license of a VC You have to be open to the community to let anybody involved in Decisions that are and you have to develop in the open It has to be clear where you want the product to go and what when you accept or don't accept features That has to be very clear and there's a number of venture backed companies that make products that are open source But only have one of the pillars. They're just technically open source because they're under an open source license But they're missing the open community and they're missing the the open developments And so I think one of the reasons open tofu Has has had so much traction and grew so fast is because we're we're we're starting a project that has all three pillars We are open to the community We are letting anyone and the Linux Foundation is super helpful for for making that happen We're open to anyone contributing and we're also developing in the in the open making it clear what the product direction is what the project direction is and And when we're there were features will accept and which features are not aligned and and none of those decisions are made in the back room In with our community involvement, so we have an RFC process all of that just in the political world They're like rhinos and dinos. Yeah Same thing. Oh, so I know That's right. Yeah, and now let's talk about open tofu when you folks responded to create open TF And then what led to creation of open tofu in the the very first iteration we we chose the number the name open TF because No, because it pointed pointed very well to what we intended to what we want the project to be and then And then we decided that with the Linux Foundation We decided that we need the Linux Foundation is great at providing not just technical governance So they they've helped us create the technical steering committee, etc but they're also great with legal and Security and all of the other things that a project needs to be successful long-term when they're sometimes competing interests and So they've provided us with the legal framework that has led to us file the trademarks file of the computer license agreements and all the things to make sure that the project is on a very very sure legal standing and so the the change of name was was Made in part to make it easy to search and easy to find information documentation, etc But also in a part of it is just to make sure that enterprises can adopt the product without any sort of IP Issues now. Let's also talk about users and customers who were or who are using Terraform But because of the license change, they might not be able to use it is open tofu going to be a kind of drop-in replacement for it What does it mean for compatibility? How how you will ensure future compatibility how because we Don't when we look at the solely custom. We don't work in isolation, you know, we mix and match a lot of things so the impact on customer and How open to food is going to be a fully drop-in replacement or it's just a patchwork for now so fantastic fantastic question so To to answer that question need to provide a little bit of context Think of it a very large organization like yesterday on stage Alliance was talking about Their their usage There one of the largest insurance companies in the world. They use Terraform very extensively across teams across continents and so they have a very large Terraform code base and When has your corporate decided to change the source the the licensing to the business source license all of that code Instantly became a liability So they had to choose a path forward And when when open tofu was announced they were very excited at the at the prospect of taking that and Using the drop-in and replacement that open tofu is to be able to make make sure there's a path forward That stays open source so that they can continue to have that code base and all the work that they've done to make sure They can continue to use that And so it's it's it's vital for us to do two things one Open tofu must be and is backwards compatible with with with Terraform and to it needs to be For a company or for any enterprise it needs to be possible for teams Individually to move to open tofu without requiring an organization wide movement to it So that allows for a lot more agility allows for people on their own time teams on their own timeline to migrate to open tofu And because it's a drop-in replacements, you just keep your code as is you just change a few you change your binary to use tofu And and you're good to go and then we look at open tofu Or if you look at a lot of other projects, which are within Linux Foundation umbrellas Open source can easily like when you talk about big organizations, they have all the resources a lot of other companies They don't have resource. That's why they go with the commercial players So is open tofu going to be just a project or just like Kubernetes or Linux kernel? There will be a vendor ecosystem around that so folks can because First of all without commercialization open source doesn't succeed, but the commercialization should be around the open source You know code base. So do you also envision an ecosystem around open tofu? There actually already is there's a there's I think two two dozen vendors that are already providing services on top of open tofu And and so the way I think about it is that on one side you have like a single vendor ecosystem and on this other side you have a An ecosystem with many many options and in the history has shown us time and time again that open source tends to become a winner takes all sort of sort of game and We're seeing pytorch just completely overtake Tenser flow and I think I think that's that ties back to those three pillars I was talking about like once once you have an open source project that is accepting of the community that that develops in the open people gravitate towards that and then become self-reinforcing self-reinforcing you have You have more options more tools around it And then because the more tools that there are the more valuable it is and the more incentive there is for to choose it and And and and then you you have this kind of virtuous cycle where there's more and more adoption after this release You know everything will be released under business source license at Terraform What does it mean for open tofu community because you folks will have to kind of diverse on a totally different path? So can you talk about that once again the Linux foundations provided us with amazing legal guidance and and and very helpful a very helpful framework for Banking show the product is via is successful long-term and one of the one of that is a is a Scott He's he's a counsel at at the links foundation And and so working with him we developed a series of guidelines for developers that will work That are working on open tofu and one of them is They should not and they must not look at any Terraform code and so We're relying on the community When they see that open tofu Perhaps has a bug or something like that. They will report what the What what the what what the problem is and the developers working on open tofu will only rely on the the bug reports and only rely on the the behaviors and They will not Look at any Terraform code to before developing open tofu code and that's to make sure that there's no IP issues whatsoever with open tofu So there's a very rigid very Bulletproof process by which we will write codes For open tofu to make sure that there's no copyright infringement to make sure that the that the code base is clean As you said, you know that developers are not supposed to and they must and they will not look at that Terraform code What I want to understand is that does that mean that open tofu will kind of become a parallel? Like there are a lot of open source projects which are created as a replacement for proprietary code base, right? And and they build a much larger community, you know as compared to the original Project product that was there So is to open tofu also moving that direction that it will become an answer to a lot of problems in that space Yeah, 100% so open tofu will no longer share a code base with with Terraform Because because it's now proprietary That being said It won't share like the the the code written for Terraform will won't be moved and won't be copied into Into open tofu that being said it is still a core tenets of open tofu to be interoperable To be backwards compatible and to be a drop in replacements So so the code bases will eventually diverge over time But the compatibility with all the providers the compatibility with the with the the the the core binary that will continue for a while And so it'll be implemented separately, but you will not be able to provide Vanity compatibility like one year from now when the code is diverse too much again great question The the goals is to provide long-term a hundred percent Interoperability that means that's that to say a year from now if HashiCorp adds some new feature to 1.7 or 1.8 then we will rely on the community to Through an RFC process to say hey, this is a this is a cool feature We think open tofu should have that as well there'll be an RFC processor into the community can say yeah, we agree we disagree and And then we will Consider implementing that if that's what the community wants and if so we will implement it in a manner without looking at any code That that has been written for Terraform and so that makes sure that we are able to Remain interoperable where let enterprises can still move to open tofu and the teams that are maybe lagging a little bit behind They can do that at their own speed and and an open tofu will have that interoperability and in a second phase after the first After like after the main goal of drop-in replacement and interoperable. There's I'm there will be Features and functionality suggested by the community that Terraform won't have and so over time open tofu will have everything Terraform has But and more and more right and so that's the power of open source And after a while likes when you start getting 50 or 100 organizations kind of contributing to to open tofu it becomes a game of catch up for hat for hashiCorp and And we hope one day that hashiCorp will come to its senses and join us at the Linux Foundation and join open tofu Will become their upstream and exactly and then That will be a glorious day and and we'll be incredibly happy to welcome them It has happened before Linux on in the early days when Google is start working Android You know Linus was not happy and then eventually they merged the code base and it happened Will it be wrong to say that open tofu is being driven by the user community who were suddenly shocked by this announcement? So this is more or less like a user community driven project burial all the user as you gave example They are trying to build it to solve their problem. That's right. I'm a user I mean, I've been a user of Terraform now. I'm now an open tofu user And and all the folks that have been contributing to open tofu so far have started out as Terraform users and so we're first and foremost a community of folks that love Terraform And I emphasize that we love that product And we're excited to to continue its path Continued the an open source path for us, but but fundamentally we we were then this is why I was saying I'm incredible Incredibly grateful to to Mitchell It has changed the the world of infrastructure, it's made managing infrastructure cleaner is simpler easier to documents. It's just it's a 10x improvement over what was available before and And And so that's why we're so passionate about about this and and I think The going back to these three pillars. I was talking about we're excited about an even better future for it Well, last question you heard this up is that Is it also possible for a lot of large enterprise customers to continue to use Terraform for some use cases and use open To a foo for a lot of development other use cases Yeah, I can see that happening for for for years a large organizations have Hundreds of teams that move that have different priorities and I can see a team using Terraform for a while and and well The majority uses open tofu That being said, I do think that in the medium to long-term horizon There won't be much of a reason to use Terraform as I believe that the velocity of an of an openly developed community first project That that velocity is is very hard to keep up with for one organization Alone and so I think there will be less and less reasons to to use a proprietary product versus an open source one That's superior. Can you also talk about what does it mean for cloud providers and their users with the open-tooth experience? Yeah, I can't speak for those organizations, of course But I would say that it's it's fairly obvious that the these Organizations they care about the user experience they care about the developer experience of their users And because open tofu is an open community Projects it is much easier for them to contribute and improve the developer experience for for their customers And so I can see a world in which all the cloud providers end up massively embracing open tofu because it helps them provide a better developer experience for for their customers and And that's gonna be great for the community. That's gonna be great for the world of infrastructure I'd also say that just from like a strategic perspective. It's and again I'm speculating but I would say that It's a little bit dangerous for a big cloud provider like that to let an organization That's that they don't have any control over Be the intermediary between between their customers and them If you think about it if you're using Amazon today and you're using Terraform then your experience Using Amazon products is going to be limited by how well Terraform works and how well the adress provider works for Terraform Whereas for open tofu Amazon could join forces and they could improve open tofu so that it works better for their customers And so I can see a world as well in which the cloud providers That care very deeply about the developer experience that they they prefer working with open tofu In order to get closer to their customers and in order to provide a better DX Sebastian, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about open tofu And I love that we focus more on the customers how you're solving problem for them So thanks for all those insights and I would love to chat with you again when there's new Yeah, and you ask great questions and this was a very fun conversation