I'm impressed by the speed at which you've forked the project and brought up the new technical infrastructure. You mention that you are 'interim tech lead'; what does interim mean in this context, and what is the governance structure for future leadership (and presumably your replacement)? Will OpenTofu have a self-selecting board? Or will it be democratic by vote, and if so, have suffrage by membership, participation or something else? Maybe top-down BDFL appointed by the Linux Foundation?
I am curious because your Manifesto states that as a result of LF stewardship the 'community governs the project'. The LF is massive, with a much more extensive portfolio than most people think, and influential far beyond its staffing would indicate. There is a great range of governance models and community norms across its projects, and, as with many things in FOSS leadership, no easy answer to the question of which the best option is among those.
As tech lead, it is your responsibility to choose what model and venue OpenTofu will adopt to fulfil its promises sustainably; I hope and imagine that you have been given the authority to make these choices decisively. The stewardship of the Linux Foundation is not an automatic guarantee of success, and the resources that the LF can provide are significant, unusual in FOSS, and very difficult to use - and concerningly easy to abuse unless directed by clear leadership. I wish you all the best of luck in this challenging but exciting task, and am curious to discover how you intend to take this project forward into the future.
The initiative will have a steering committee composed of individuals from the main backing and involved companies and projects.
As interim technical lead I'm mostly responsible for the technical side of things and getting the project up and running in this first phase. This also includes the feature development process and similar things. Interim means "until we figure out the exact details of the governance process", so a couple of weeks, most likely.
Representatives of the main organizations backing the initiative are collaborating with the LF to iron out the governance model. In practice, all of this is a collaborative process among the main backers.
The initial steering committee has already been selected and was to my knowledge a prerequisite to even being accepted to the LF. Currently each of the following organizations has a single seat: Gruntworks, Harness, Spacelift, env0, Scalr. There are free seats reserved for future joinees.
As a heavy terraform user who can't wait to migrate away from Hashicorp, I don't care. It's just a name. After the first dozen uses you won't even notice, it'll be as natural as any other command.
It's a nice pun and at the same time is close to the original, which would help Terraform users recognize the brand. Your suggestions are nice, but less recognizable in that way.
Maybe we can take that pun to extreme though! If they ever have a designer that can come up with some crazy lore of terraforming with tofu that would be really really awesome. But I think they have more pressing matters right now.
Out of curiosity, how does OpenJDK not get sued into fine pulp over this? Oracle owns the Java trademark and aren’t exactly known for being kind in matters of litigation.
I really like the new name and branding. Very cohesive, easy to pronounce, website looks good (and the benefits of this cannot be overstated). Hopefully the community can grow around it.
The link and github does not tell much what OpenTofu is. So I opened the official website. Again very hard to find out what it actually is. Goals and why it was created, and a hundred times that it's a fork of another product.
But still does not explain what it is or does.
I had to open the website of what it was forked from.
Yeah, but what is 'infrastructure as code'? For anyone not already in the know, this phrase doesn't mean "managing and provisioning data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools." (quote from Wikipedia), it just means nothing at all.
I assumed it mean representing various infrastructure (load balancers, http servers, microservices, databases, etc and their interconnections) as resources that you can add relations to in a code description and then it could resolve those as code, if you add new resources (code), it can work out dependencies and therefore help coordinate and make sure you don't overlook some critical link (like version compatibility) as developers add to it. It seems to have provisioning for CI as well.
True, I might have skimmed it. But even now that does not tell me much.
Best that I found was under Docs -> intro -> What is OpenTF?:
> OpenTF is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. You can then use a consistent workflow to provision and manage all of your infrastructure throughout its lifecycle
That could have been on the frontpage somewhere. Or in the github description.
Great initiative, and I'm sure that with the community's stewardship this will become a better tool than TF ever was. Me personally, I'm happy about the licence change because it pushed me to Pulumi and I'm absolutely loving it, which I could never say about TF, quite the opposite.
Readit News
I'd like to add that as of today (announced just now at OSS Bilbao) we're officially part of the Linux Foundation[0]!
Hope you like the new name (it basically won the votes anywhere it was proposed) and happy to answer any questions!
[0]: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/announcing-opentofu
I am curious because your Manifesto states that as a result of LF stewardship the 'community governs the project'. The LF is massive, with a much more extensive portfolio than most people think, and influential far beyond its staffing would indicate. There is a great range of governance models and community norms across its projects, and, as with many things in FOSS leadership, no easy answer to the question of which the best option is among those.
As tech lead, it is your responsibility to choose what model and venue OpenTofu will adopt to fulfil its promises sustainably; I hope and imagine that you have been given the authority to make these choices decisively. The stewardship of the Linux Foundation is not an automatic guarantee of success, and the resources that the LF can provide are significant, unusual in FOSS, and very difficult to use - and concerningly easy to abuse unless directed by clear leadership. I wish you all the best of luck in this challenging but exciting task, and am curious to discover how you intend to take this project forward into the future.
The initiative will have a steering committee composed of individuals from the main backing and involved companies and projects.
As interim technical lead I'm mostly responsible for the technical side of things and getting the project up and running in this first phase. This also includes the feature development process and similar things. Interim means "until we figure out the exact details of the governance process", so a couple of weeks, most likely.
Representatives of the main organizations backing the initiative are collaborating with the LF to iron out the governance model. In practice, all of this is a collaborative process among the main backers.
The initial steering committee has already been selected and was to my knowledge a prerequisite to even being accepted to the LF. Currently each of the following organizations has a single seat: Gruntworks, Harness, Spacelift, env0, Scalr. There are free seats reserved for future joinees.
Dead Comment
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinky_tofu
How about "Genesis" or "Reliant" or "Marcus" or "Kruge"?
Maybe we can take that pun to extreme though! If they ever have a designer that can come up with some crazy lore of terraforming with tofu that would be really really awesome. But I think they have more pressing matters right now.
tofu is short for torafurm.
Dead Comment
Here are some links that are specifically about the name change:
- https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/296
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/20/terraform-fork-gets-a-new-...
- https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/20/terraform_fork_opentf...
"The name OpenTofu was adopted out of concern for, as you might have already guessed, trademark litigation."
Because Hashicorp might not like the "TF" (for Terraform).
(Reference for non-UK viewers: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2022/oct/18/suell...)
Whatever else, but you have to give her props for inventing the word "wokerati". That word sounds so ridiculous that it might become cool again.
Perjorative labels aren't what they used to be, people are happy to be labelled most of the time, so yes, maybe it'll be cool to be a, erm, "wokerat"?
Also lol.
Well done and good luck keeping up the momentum.
Hasn't that ship sailed? Even if Hashicorp did that, would the community still be willing to mend this breakup, or declare that trust was lost?
But still does not explain what it is or does.
I had to open the website of what it was forked from.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use
Best that I found was under Docs -> intro -> What is OpenTF?:
> OpenTF is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. You can then use a consistent workflow to provision and manage all of your infrastructure throughout its lifecycle
That could have been on the frontpage somewhere. Or in the github description.