By HashiCorp surprisingly changed the license of many known and widely used products, including Terraform or Vault, from the open source license MPL (Mozilla Public License 2.0) to BSL (Business Source License) – obviously not a open source license.
HashiCorp announced a transition from the Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL, or BUSL) v1.1 for future releases of all products and several libraries. HashiCorp APIs, SDKs, and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0.
HashiCorp
Similar to Elastic, which changed the license of Elasticsearch, Kibana and their other products in 2021, HashiCorp has now done the same now and the outcry in the open source community is big.
HashiCorp was for a very long time considered a "super open source" company, with great and widely used products praised as open source and community driven software. This radical change comes as a surprise to many.
OpenTF: An open Terraform alternative
It didn't even take a week and resistance has formed quickly. Especially for the Terraform project; the OpenTF project (Open Terraform) was created and is seeking for support and contributors. A public repository was created on GitHub.
The manifesto on the OpenTF web site explains the concerns of the developers and project leaders:
It is clear to us that under the new license, the thriving ecosystem built up around the open source Terraform will dwindle and wither. As developers consider what tools to learn and what ecosystems to contribute to, and as companies consider what tools to use to manage their infrastructure, more and more, they'll pick alternatives that are genuinely open-source. Existing Terraform codebases will turn into outdated liabilities, independent tooling will all but disappear, and the community will fracture and disappear.
OpenTF Foundation
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