[quacker]

> The paid features have nothing to do with the providers;

They absolutely do. If I use AWS and Pulumi could not deploy to AWS, well I'm certainly not going to buy Pulumi Cloud, am I? If I use multiple cloud providers and Pulumi doesn't support all of them, I'm unlikely to invest further in Pulumi Cloud, right?

The providers determine whether I can even use the tool to do what I want in the first place. The providers are 99% of the value!

The fact that Pulumi leverages the Terraform AWS provider under the hood adds huge value for them, and I absolutely believe they indirectly profit off of that.

[yellowapple]

> They absolutely do.

No, they absolutely do not. Pulumi - as in the actual tool, not its developers' equivalent to Terraform Cloud - would still exist and would have used those providers regardless of whether or not there's some Pulumi equivalent to Terraform Cloud. Pulumi also would've existed (and resulted in indirect profits via Pulumi Cloud) had that provider ecosystem not yet existed; it just would've been Pulumi starting it instead of Hashicorp/Terraform.

> The providers determine whether I can even use the tool to do what I want in the first place. The providers are 99% of the value!

And you can use 100% of that value without paying a fraction of a penny to Pulumi, just as you can without paying a fraction of a penny to Hashicorp. It's a completely different offering from their respective paid products altogether.

> I absolutely believe they indirectly profit off of that.

You say this as if it's a one-way street, but it ain't. Pulumi and Hashicorp profit from there being an ecosystem of providers compatible with both and therefore useful to both sets of customers. That's one of the main sales pitches for open source, after all: to collaborate on something that benefits everyone instead of wasting a bunch of effort on independent silos.

That is: Hashicorp indirectly profits off Pulumi's own contributions to that same ecosystem. They could profit even more by making Terraform compatible with Pulumi's provider interface (even still! I'm pretty sure Apache 2.0 code can be included in non-FOSS codebases, BUSL included).

Like, the relationship between Hashicorp and Pulumi is not just to the letter but to the spirit of free and open source software. If Pulumi's existence and success (despite being nowhere near that of Terraform, and despite also being open source - even more permissively so, in fact) is indeed what motivated Hashicorp to switch Terraform from MPL 2.0 to BUSL, then that's toxic as all hell and completely nullifies any of Hashicorp's lip service to "open source".

[quacker]

> You say this as if it's a one-way street, but it ain't. Pulumi and Hashicorp profit from there being an ecosystem of providers compatible with both and therefore useful to both sets of customers.

This is idealism.

The reality is Pulumi's providers have no value for Terraform, which already built and curated its own ecosystem after years of time and effort. Then, Pulumi can spin up a directly competing product in a fraction of the time by reusing all of that work. So I understand the motivation for the license change.

Circling back to your original comment which spawned this thread:

> Like, has anyone of any significance used a Hashicorp product to meaningfully compete with Hashicorp?

The answer is unequivocally "yes". Pulumi has. And Pulumi can continue to do so, apparently. Terraform providers continue to be MPL-licensed.

Another example I learned of was IBM Cloud Secrets Manager, which is basically reselling Vault: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/secrets-manager

With IBM Cloud® Secrets Manager, you can create secrets dynamically and lease them to applications while you control access from a single location. Built on open source HashiCorp Vault, Secrets Manager helps you get the data isolation of a dedicated environment with the benefits of a public cloud.

[yellowapple]

> This is idealism.

No, it's realism. The only one to blame for Hashicorp not adequately capitalizing on the two-way street that is multiple FOSS (well, formerly, in one case) IaC systems being compatible with one another... is Hashicorp. Instead of recognizing a case where "open source" is mutually beneficial, they'd rather take their ball and go home - and that's their right, but it ain't beyond criticism.

> The reality is Pulumi's providers have no value for Terraform, which already built and curated its own ecosystem after years of time and effort

The reality is that Hashicorp adopted Pulumi's strategy of autogenerating provider resources from API catalogs rather than maintaining handwritten bindings (i.e. what differentiates Pulumi's "native" v. "classic" providers). So yes, Pulumi's providers clearly have value. Hell, they can continue to have value even after Hashicorp's BUSL shenanigans thanks to Apache 2.0 being permissive.

> The answer is unequivocally "yes". Pulumi has.

The answer is hardly "unequivocal", per above and per the previous comments. Calling a collection of third-party-developed API shims a "product" is itself a massive stretch of the word, and calling bidirectional / mutually beneficial contribution to that collection "competition" is itself a massive stretch of the word.

IBM Cloud Secrets Manager is much better evidence in support of an unequivocal "yes" (though like most non-mainframe IBM-branded products these days I'd question whether or not it counts as "of any significance").