Opinion piece: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols Fri 12 Apr 2024 // 09:31 UTC
Since its founding, the Linux Foundation has been a vendor-neutral supporter of Linux and open source software. Now, though, it’s actively promoting such open source projects as OpenTofu and Valkey.
The Linux Foundation started in 2007 when the Open Source Development Lab joined forces with the Free Standards Group to support Linux. In 2010, though, it evolved into a neutral, trusted foundation of foundations for developers and organizations to code, manage, and scale open technology projects and ecosystems. Then, in 2023, it took a firmer open source stand by supporting OpenTofu and Valkey against their faux open source parent companies.
To refresh you on what’s what here, last August HashiCorp dumped its Terraform infrastructure-as-code tool’s open source Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPLv2) for the semi-proprietary Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 license. Terraform users, developers, and partners were not happy. So, as open source people are wont to do in situations like this, they forked the code into OpenTF.
So far, so much as usual. We’ve seen this happen time after time. For example, you might have heard of Jenkins, the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) program. Unless you paid really close attention, though, you probably didn’t know that its creator forked it from an earlier program named Hudson after Oracle tried to grab control of it. And, of course, the same story is true of LibreOffice’s forking from OpenOffice.
But then things took an interesting turn. Usually, these forks either make their way on their own or, as in the case of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) OpenSearch fork of Elastic, a major technology power backs the fork. This time, though, the Linux Foundation stepped in to take control of OpenTF and rename it OpenTofu.
“…The problem the Linux Foundation is trying to solve here is the rise of faux open source licenses such as BSL and SSPL. Far too many companies have taken to building on top of open source projects, achieving a measure of success, and then turning their backs on open source in an attempt to squeeze more money out of their customers and partners.”
