Hey!
> With OpenTofu exclusive features making such an early debut, is the intention to remain a superset of upstream Terraform functionality and spec, or allow OpenTofu to diverge and move in its own direction?
The intention is to let it diverge. There will surely be some amount of shared new features, but we're generally going our own way.
> Will you aim to stick to compatibility with Terraform providers/modules?
Yes.
Regarding providers, we might introduce some kind of superset protocol for providers at some point, for tofu-exclusive functionality, but we'll make sure to design it in a way where providers keep working with both Terraform and OpenTofu.
Regarding modules, this one will be more tricky, as there might be Terraform languages features that aren't supported in OpenTofu and vice-versa. We have a proposal[0] to tackle this, and enable module authors to easily create modules with support for both, even when using some exclusive features of any one of them.
> Is the potential impact of community fragmentation on your mind as many commercial users who don’t care about open source ideology stick to the tried-and-true Hashicorp Terraform?
We've talked to a lot of people, and we've met many who see the license changes as a risk for them, while OpenTofu, with its open-source nature, is the less-risky choice in their eyes. That includes large enterprises.
> Is there any intention to try and supplement the tooling around the core product to provide an answer to features like Terraform Cloud dashboard, sentinel policies and other things companies may want out of the product outside of the command line tool itself?
That's mostly covered by the companies sponsoring OpenTofu's development: Spacelift (I work here), env0, Scalr, Harness, Gruntworks.
[0]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1328