On August 10th 2023, HashiCorp changed the license of many of its open source projects, including Terraform, to the source-available BUSL license. In response, the OpenTofu project was made with the commitment to maintain an open source fork of Terraform. Since the fork, OpenTofu has been accepted into the Linux Foundation, cementing it as an open source project. A team of talented developers have been working full-time on first stable release of OpenTofu.
While hitting the “fork” button on GitHub is easy, it is only the beginning. The OpenTofu team has spent the last months creating the necessary infrastructure to give OpenTofu users the high-quality experience they are used to.
OpenTofu 1.6 is 100% compatible with Terraform 1.6. Migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu is easy and fully documented.
As the first release, OpenTofu 1.6.0 is conservative. It introduces the tofu test feature as well as numerous smaller enhancements. With the stable release out, version 1.7.0 is already being planned. One feature we are especially looking forward to is encrypted state files.
Installing OpenTofu
An OpenTofu package probably exists for your favorite Linux distribution. Of course, it can also be installed from source.