[TAForObvReasons]

This seems to ignore the first part of the story, where Hashicorp builds up a community around an open source project and relicenses the project. OpenTofu and now OpenBao wouldn't have happened if Hashicorp didn't relicense in the first place.

[FridgeSeal]

You don’t think that the licence changes were intended exactly these scenarios? Because it sure seems to me that they were.

The vast majority of users were, and are, completely unaffected by the licence changes. You’re really only affected if you are selling TF services commercially.

[evv]

Welcome to Open Source, where being actually open is a competitive advantage!

If you want users of your software to have the brightest future, you need to accept the fact that others can make money and services with your code. If you try to shut that down, people will fork the most recent version of your code that has an OSI compatible license.

Of course, they could have chosen a license like AGPL in the first place, which prohibits services with non-AGPL changes. But then, the product would have been less likely to have the viral growth that HC products enjoyed.

[jzb]

“The vast majority of users were, and are, completely unaffected by the licence changes.”

Only true if you believe that the new license is safe to use, and that HC can be trusted to stop with this change. The license they adopted isn’t well understood and if I were a corporate lawyer I’d be hesitant to approve it.

Defining “competitive” use is basically up to HC, so that makes the license real iffy.

They’ve poisoned the well for contributions going forward, so HC as an upstream is much less attractive now.

[maronato]

I don’t really understand the critics here.

Just as Hashicorp should have understood that the license they chose allows people to use the code as they please, contributors should have understood that Hashicorp could change the license at any time.

If we decide that building companies on top of commercialized open source projects is moral, then we must agree that changing the license is too.

[bogantech]

The license change wouldn't have happened without the leeches either