Three years ago, the Infrastructure as Code conversation was effectively settled. You used Terraform. You argued about modules and remote state and occasionally workspaces, but the tool was the default and everyone moved on to more interesting problems. That consensus is gone. HashiCorp’s license change and subsequent acquisition by IBM cracked the foundation. OpenTofu forked. Pulumi has gained real traction in engineering-heavy organizations. Crossplane offers a different philosophy entirely. And platform teams are now making a choice they had not seriously considered for nearly a decade. This piece lays out the landscape as it stands in 2026, and offers a decision framework based on team skills, existing estate, and what actually breaks when the tool is put under real scale. The landscape, briefly Terraform (HashiCorp, now IBM) Still the largest installed base. License is now Business Source License, which restricts competitive hosting but does not affect the overwhelming majority of users.…