 | |
| Developer(s) | Linux Foundation |
|---|---|
| Stable release | |
| Repository | github |
| Written in | Go |
| Predecessor | Terraform |
| License | Mozilla Public License 2.0 |
| Website | opentofu |
OpenTofu is a software project for infrastructure as code that is managed by the Linux Foundation. [2]
The last MPL-licensed version of Terraform was forked as OpenTofu in August 2023 after HashiCorp announced that all products produced by the company would be relicensed under the Business Source License (BUSL), with HashiCorp prohibiting commercial use of the community edition by those who offer "competitive services". In April 2024, HashiCorp sent a cease and desist notice to the OpenTofu project, stating that it had incorporated code from a BUSL-licensed version of Terraform without permission and "incorrectly re-labeled HashiCorp's code to make it appear as if it was made available by HashiCorp originally under a different license." OpenTofu denied the allegation, stating that the code cited had originated from an MPL-licensed version of Terraform. [3] [4]
Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose. They grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications. These criteria are outlined in the Open Source Definition.
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of both open-source and proprietary developers. It is distinguished from others as a middle ground between the permissive software BSD-style licenses and the GNU General Public License. As such, it allows the integration of MPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases, as long as the MPL-licensed components remain accessible under the terms of the MPL.
The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary. In 2005 the Open Source Initiative approved the license. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers it a free software license, but one which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).
iText is a library for creating and manipulating PDF files in Java and .NET. It was created in 2000 and written by Bruno Lowagie. The source code was initially distributed as open source under the Mozilla Public License or the GNU Library General Public License open source licenses. However, as of version 5.0.0 and version 4.2.0 it is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. A fork of the LGPL/MPL licensed version of iText is currently being actively maintained as the OpenPDF library on GitHub. iText is also available through a proprietary license, distributed by iText Software NV.
SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape 7.
Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate the number of licenses used, e.g. dual-licensed for software licensed under two different licenses.
Komodo Edit is a free and open source text editor for dynamic programming languages. It was introduced in January 2007 to complement ActiveState's commercial Komodo IDE. As of version 4.3, Komodo Edit is built atop the Open Komodo project. Komodo IDE is no longer supported and maintained by developers for Python.
This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.
GNU IceCat, formerly known as GNU IceWeasel, is a completely free version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser distributed by the GNU Project. It is compatible with Linux, Windows, Android and macOS.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.
The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU GPL version 3 and the Affero General Public License (non-GNU).
A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically software under an open source license.
The GNU General Public Licenses are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedoms to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first copyleft license available for general use. It was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License, and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache.
The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. The term was coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008.
Vagrant is a source-available software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments; e.g., for VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, Parallels, and AWS. It tries to simplify the software configuration management of virtualization in order to increase development productivity. Vagrant is written in the Ruby language, but its ecosystem supports development in a few other languages.
HashiCorp, Inc. is an American software company with a freemium business model based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides tools and products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secure, run and connect cloud-computing infrastructure. It was founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar. The company name HashiCorp is a portmanteau of co-founder last name Hashimoto and Corporation.
Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one.
Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code software tool created by HashiCorp. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.
The Business Source License is a software license which publishes source code but limits the right to use the software to certain classes of users. The BUSL is not an open-source license, but it is source-available license that also mandates an eventual transition to an open-source license. This characteristic has been described as a compromise between traditional proprietary licenses and open source.
