Under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, the OpenBao project has been established to continue the development of the Hashicorp Vault codebase under the open MPLv2 (Mozilla Public License). The fork was created in response to HashiCorp's transition of its products to a proprietary BSL 1.1 license, which restricts the use of code in cloud systems competing with HashiCorp's products and services.
The creators of the OpenBao project intend to continue the development of the Hashicorp Vault fork on the neutral platform of the Linux Foundation, with the participation of a community composed of interested companies and enthusiasts, utilizing an open governance model. The fork will branch off from Hashicorp Vault version 1.14.x and will include all changes published under the MPL 2.0 license. The initiator of the fork is Sebastian Stadil, head and founder of the DevOps company Scalr, who is also one of the creators of the OpenTofu project. Engineers from IBM, who are supporting the LF Edge project, have also joined the work on the fork.
Hashicorp Vault provides tools for managing, storing, and distributing certificates, keys, API tokens, passwords, and other confidential information, as well as organizing access to secret data, maintaining audit logs, generating passwords and tokens, encrypting data, and ensuring the revocation of compromised secrets. Hashicorp has announced that it will stop publishing fixes for Hashicorp Vault releases under the MPL license after December 31, 2023.
The change in licensing is explained by the desire to maintain funding for their developments in light of the inability of traditional licensing models to counteract the exploitation by companies that use the readily available open-source developments of HashiCorp to create their own commercial cloud products without contributing to collaborative development. According to a report published a few days ago, Hashicorp's revenue for the third fiscal quarter ending October 31, 2023, reached $146.1 million, which is 17% higher than the same period last year. The company's losses decreased from $72 million to $39.5 million.
Additionally, it's worth noting the start of beta testing for the first release of OpenTofu, a fork of the Hashicorp Terraform configuration management and infrastructure automation platform. The first release of OpenTofu is based on the Terraform 1.6 branch, supports all existing features, and contains several additional fixes and improvements aimed at enhancing security. As an alternative to the Terraform Registry, a registry of all providers and modules that can be used with OpenTofu has been created by the project.
OpenTofu is being developed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation using the open-source MPLv2 license. Support for OpenTofu and the intention to participate in the fork's development have been announced by 158 companies and 780 individual developers. Companies joining the OpenTofu initiative have allocated resources equivalent to the work of 18 full-time engineers over the next 5 years for the fork's development (for comparison, the last two years, 5 engineers have been working on maintaining Terraform at HashiCorp).
Source: opennet.ru
