Create a better open-source Terrraform alternative

[anuragvishwa]

Since we already have more than 2K people supporting our cause, why not start a project for creating an IAAS tool which is completely open source and has no licence issue?

So many projects and companies are at stake if we could pull this off even in an year we could save the community from upcoming hassles .

If people just donate an hour of their time every day to this project we could soon have a useful product.

[Magnitus-]

I toyed with the notion of a completely rethought independent project that just leverage Terraform's provider protocol to at least avoid losing all the work that has been done on all the Terraform providers out there (it seems like Pulumi does something like that actually).

However, most of the work done on terraform scripts (in HCL) would be lost and for many of us, that is significant.

For some of the companies that are even more embedded in the terraform ecosystem than that and which are really boosting the credibility of this initiative, it is probably even worse still.

[marcinwyszynski]

One of the things we'd like to do with OpenTF is to open up the project structure so that some parts of OpenTF can become stable building blocks for a new generation of tools that will still be able to easily tap into this rich ecosystem. So one way to think about OpenTF is the successor of legacy Terraform, but the other one is as a stepping stone for new adventures for these restless souls among us :)

[anuragvishwa]

it is probably even worse still.

Same kind of situation occurred with the licensing of Java by Oracle, which forced Google to use Kotlin (which uses underlying JVM) for Android development.

Same kind of solution could be figured out for terraform, since HCL language is MPL 2.0 licensed , underlying project could be created to compile and run it. It is a definitely not easy but in long term we need to come up with something concrete .

I am even considering using Crossplane for IAAS for upcoming projects .

[displague]

@anuragvishwa The Crossplane ecosystem, like Pulumi and kubeform, includes (not exclusively) Terraform providers.

[anuragvishwa]

Then community is right in making a fork and then creating open source version of Terraform.
I would also contribute to the same.

[mpdehaan]

I would definitely like to see Terraform guts evolve into being more of a cross-language library that could be used in other projects as well, the thing I like the least about Terraform is the language, the idea of having community maintained providers keeping up with what quirks the cloud providers make in their own APIs is valuable. i.e. support Go, but having bindings for Rust would be great for me, and I imagine a lot of people would like to see Python.

(see https://www.jetporch.com)