Follow Up Questions

[Magnitus-]

In the event that Hashicorp sticks to their gun concerning their current license change for Terraform (something I consider likely unfortunately), I think the following questions will need to be addressed:

• What name will the fork have? (will opentf be the final name?)
• What deadline should be given before work on a fork starts?
• What are the immediate changes that will have to be made for the fork to be viable, separate from the Hashicorp organization?

Concerning the last point, I surmise the following work would have to be undertaken:

• We'd have to gradually rip "terraform" from the codebase and change it to the new name for the project, prioritizing what is externally visible first (in order not to infringe on trademarks)
• Plan for a replacement for the Terraform registry for providers and modules. That would probably entail implementing a centralized default with the possibility for the user to substitute it for their own.
• Work on a website and documentation for the fork.

[Magnitus-]

Thinking about it some more, given that hcl stands for Hashicorp Configuration Language, maybe the underlying language itself should be renamed (again, for trademarks concerns).

I guess if the project name is opentf, perhaps ocl (for Open Configuration Language)? It has an appealing symmetry, I think.

Anyways, I'm not a lawyer, but food for thought.

[Magnitus-]

I started some work on a fork based on the v1.5.5 release: https://github.com/Magnitus-/opentf

I did my best to lawyer-proof the main README. I changed the internal reference of the project to opentf so it now automatically compile to a opentf binary.

I have a pretty demanding full-time job, but I'll work on this as time allows basing myself on the above points I raised for starters.

Honestly, I'm not sure if it will be useful in the end, but therapeutically, this is something I need to do to feel like I'm gaining some control of the situation. Patiently waiting and hoping for others to do the right thing is not my strong suit I'm afraid.

[phanirithvij]

Is it possible for latest commit with the previous license be forked than the latest release?

[Magnitus-]

Is it possible for latest commit with the previous license be forked than the latest release?

I was thinking about that a little bit.

I figured the latest release is probably more stable than an in-between and as we'll likely do many changes with uncertain consequences (at least speaking from my perspective as someone less familiar with the codebase), it would lead to less questioning as to where potential problems are coming from if the version of the codebase we are using is solid.

But I guess I can take a look at the commits that are missing.

[pdecat]

Regarding trademark use, there's this for reference: https://www.hashicorp.com/trademark-policy
The Nominative Fair Uses section is particularly interesting.

I believe opentf can still refer to HCL (which is still MPL 2.0 by the way) and Terraform when speaking of provider plugins, modules and the official registry.