We talk about Hashicorp has been aquired by IBM. The history after that was HashiCorp Abandoned Open Source (August 2023).
In August 2023, HashiCorp shifted its core products (including Terraform) from the open-source Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0) to the restrictive Business Source License (BSL/BUSL 1.1). Under this license, the source code remained viewable, but competitors were legally prohibited from using it to provide competing commercial services.
Because the final open-source versions under the MPL license could not be retroactively revoked, the community and competing vendors revolted. They immediately took the last open-source codebases and forked them:
OpenTofu:
A true community-driven, open-source fork of Terraform, hosted under the Linux Foundation.
When the project was first announced in August 2023, the founders used a temporary, literal placeholder name: OpenTF (short for Open Terraform). However, HashiCorp owns the “Terraform” trademark, meaning the project needed a completely new name to avoid legal issues before joining the Linux Foundation.
The “TF” Acronym: The name preserves the T and F from Terraform. To this day, the command-line utility is invoked using tofu, which directly mirrors how developers run terraform.
OpenBao:
Similarly, OpenBao began life with the temporary name OpenBao right from its inception when IBM/HashiCorp’s Vault license changed.
The logo is Bao (包) or Bao Zi (包子);
Bao (包) means to wrap, envelope, or contain. Bao Zi (包子) means steamed bun. While in technical circles, BAO also occasionally references a secure, isolated sandboxed container or hypervisor architecture, aligning with the project’s home under the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).