Hashicorp's license change and what it means for the Terraform community

The recent change in licensing across all Hashicorp products shows that Hashicorp is not able to or willing to compete with competitors to their enterprise offerings. Even though they officially don’t state it, the change is targeted at competitors such as Spacelift, Scalr, and Env0. Those competitors only came to be to fill in gaps that remained after and because of Hashicorp’s lacklustre and overpriced Terraform Cloud/Enterprise products.

The Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 is an open source license, but it has additional vague wording designed to prevent competitors from building competing products using the source code. The problem in this situation is that it also extends to additional products produced by the code owner (Hashicorp). This means even an open-source (non-commercial) competitor to the separate Terraform Enterprise product is not allowed to use the Terraform command, Terraform code-base or any other Hashicorp code-base. Anyone who does any form of Terraform automation, that they then provide to their clients for production use, will now need to ensure they are not seen as a competitor to a Hashicorp product.

Spacelift has already tried to reassure their customers that they are going to work on a solution going forward.

Even though Hashicorp claims to be supportive of the spirit of open source software, they aren’t supportive of open collaboration and they have been resistant to upstream contributions from the community. This resistance has created an environment where new enhancement toolsets were created then evolved into competing products with their enterprise offering. Now that they have changed their licensing, this will further exacerbate the issues. A fork of the pre-BSL licensed Terraform code-base has already appeared and if it or another fork gets enough support from the community, we could see the official Terraform toolset being replaced as the defacto Infrastructure-as-Code platform in use today.

I myself have created command wrappers and managements to improve on the limitations of the Terraform command and the lack of state file drift management. So I will be watching what happens closely and be willing to offer my contributions to any potential competitor.

Additional discussions:

Hacker News: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

Hacker News: OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp’s license change