Terraform was open-sourced in 2014 under the Mozilla Public License (v 2.0) (the “MPL”). Over the next ~9 years, it built up a community that included thousands of users, contributors, customers, certified practitioners, vendors, and an ecosystem of open-source modules, plugins, libraries, and extensions. Then, on August 10th, 2023, with little or no advance notice or chance for much, if not all, of the community to have any input, HashiCorp switched the license for Terraform from the MPL to the Business Source License (v1.1) (the “BUSL”), a non-open source license. In our opinion, this change threatens the entire community and ecosystem that’s built up around Terraform over the last 9 years. Our concern: the BUSL license is a poison pill for Terraform. Overnight, tens of thousands of businesses, ranging from one-person shops to the Fortune 500, woke up to a new reality where the underpinnings of their infrastructure suddenly became a potential legal risk. The BUSL and the additional use grant written by the HashiCorp team are vague, and now every company, vendor, and developer using Terraform has to wonder whether what they are doing could be construed as competitive with HashiCorp’s offerings. The FAQ provides some solace for end-customers and systems integrators today, but even if you might be in the clear now, how can you build confidence that your usage wont violate the license terms in the future? What if your products or HashiCorps products change? What if HashiCorp changes how they interpret competitive? What if they change the license again? As a result, everything that uses Terraform is on shaky ground. 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, theyll 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 Existing Terraform codebases will turn into outdated liabilities, independent tooling will all but disappear, and the community will fracture and disappear. This sort of change also harms all similar open-source projects. Every company and every developer now needs to think twice before adopting and investing in an open-source project in case the creator suddenly decides to change the license. Imagine if the creators of Linux or Kubernetes suddenly switched to a non-open-source license that only permitted non-competitive usage. We believe that the essential building blocks of the modern Internet, such as Linux, Kubernetes, and Terraform need to be truly open source: that is the only way to ensure that we are building our industry on top of solid and predictable underpinnings. Our goal: ensure Terraform remains truly open source—always. Our aim with this manifesto is to return Terraform to a fully open source license. BSL is not open source, so this would mean moving Terraform back to the MPL license.
