[echelon]

> HashiCorp is seeking a monopoly on hosting Terraform

HashiCorp is trying to see an upside to the thing they've put a lot of effort into building. They're seeing lots of other companies -- including Amazon -- use it to enhance their own bottom lines off of HashiCorp's hard work.

These companies pose an existential threat to HashiCorp, and the HashiCorp stakeholders are getting nothing in return.

Free repackaging lowers the fitness of HashiCorp as an organization and cuts short HashiCorp's growth potential, resulting in lower revenue, less hiring, and more competition -- all of which ultimately inhibits HashiCorp's growth into a well-rounded company with a rich set of offerings. They're effectively being knee-capped and fenced in by low-margin competition.

Meanwhile you're eating for free.

[trevex]

While this is certainly true, there is also another part of the puzzle.

There are plenty contributors in the ecosystem building providers, submitting PRs under the assumption that the ecosystem will benefit and not solely Hashicorp.

As it stands most providers are not maintained by Hashicorp, e.g. AWS, Azure, Google, Hetzner, GitLab, ...

While the license change does not directly affect the providers it limits the ecosystems use of those providers.

[sausagefeet]

HCP chose to open source Terraform. They didn't have to. They chose to market the OSS aspect of their products and use it as a selling point.

It may well be true that HCP is having trouble hitting their revenue goals because they open sourced Terraform but that doesn't mean the competition is the bad actor, for using an OSS product entirely in the spirit of OSS.

As it stands, my opinion is that your framing is incorrect. There is Terraform, which was OSS, and there is Terraform Cloud/Terraform Enterprise, which is not OSS. A lot of the development energy goes into TFC/TFE, and there is where the attractive, for pay, features are. Terraform has not been receiving a lot of development time. Only a few people from HCP, part time, working on it. I believe that the reality is that HCP is unable to keep up with their TFC/TFE product. They aren't innovating, and they are attempting to use the legal system to remove competition rather than compete on product. And now that OpenTofu exists and is part of LF, you don't even need HCP to succeed for your Terraform code to continue to live. Maybe one feels that is unfair, but it was their decision to OSS the product, and their decisions to change that. And capitalism isn't fair. Shrug emoji.