Due to changes to Terraform licenses, Oracle has decided to switch to OpenTofu with the release of EBS Cloud Manager 24.1.1.1.
EBS stands for E-Business Suite and contains business applications for order management, procurement, and human capital management, among others. According to Oracle, these applications run best in the OCI cloud to achieve scalability and performance benefits. For EBS customers who want to use OCI, the Cloud Manager was created. This tool allows companies to migrate their Linux-based systems from on-premises to the cloud.
In version 24.1.1.1 of EBS Cloud Manager, Oracle includes the important update moving from Terraform to OpenTofu. As a result, users must upgrade to the latest version by June 30, 2024.
HashiCorp’s August 2023 licensing changes prompted Oracle to switch from Terraform to OpenTofu. That’s when HashiCorp switched from Mozilla Public License v2.0 (open source) to a business license (BSL, not an open source license) for future releases. As a result, “organizations providing competitive offerings to HashiCorp will no longer be permitted to use the community edition products free of charge under our BSL license. Commercial licensing terms are available and can enable use cases beyond the BSL limitations,” HashiCorp informed.
OpenTofu as alternative
Oracle now sees opportunities to move to OpenTofu, which in turn is a Terraform fork. This leaves it relying on an open source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool for EBS Cloud Manager. The OpenTofu project is managed by the Linux Foundation. OpenTofu jumped right into HashiCorp’s licensing changes by quickly forking Terraform in August 2023.
OpenTofu quickly became one of the fastest-growing open source projects around the cloud. Now that Oracle is also converting and switching from Terraform to OpenTofu, there is the signal that the fork is ready for enterprise use.