I've been running both Terraform and OpenTofu across production infra for a while now, and the number one question I still get is some version of "wait, aren't they the same thing?" The honest answer in 2026 is: they share a common ancestor and a lot of DNA, but they are no longer the same tool. Here's what actually changed, from someone who has to keep both green in CI.
A very short history of the fork
If you missed the drama: HashiCorp relicensed Terraform from the MPL open-source license to the Business Source License (BSL) in 2023. The BSL is source-available but not OSI-approved open source, and it carries a use restriction aimed at competitors. A chunk of the community, backed by a group of vendors and users, forked the last MPL-licensed Terraform codebase. That fork landed under the Linux Foundation as OpenTofu.
So the core distinction is governance, not features: OpenTofu is a Linux Foundation project with open governance and an MPL-2.0 license, and Terraform is a HashiCorp product under the BSL. That licensing split is the reason a lot of teams looked at OpenTofu at all — if your legal team is nervous about the BSL's use restriction, an actual open-source license is the whole ballgame.
