> When any company releases their tool as open source, the contract with the community is always the same... There is no contract. Try to enforce it. Even non-

> When any company releases their tool as open source, the contract with the community is always the same... There is no contract. Try to enforce it. Even non-binding expectations differ widely among projects. > We believe that HashiCorp should earn a return by leveraging its unique position in the Terraform ecosystem to build a better product, not by outright preventing others from competing in the first place. Nobody at Hashi cares how their competitors think they should make money. As for competition, Hashi just blew the whistle for an all-comers product pace-race against its formerly free-riding rivals. The old code remains MPLv2-licesed. That's the starting line. Their new BSL automatically releases new code under MPLv2 four years after it's published. That's Hashi committing to a minimum pace. They clearly foresaw a fork. They are betting their maintenance commitment, expertise, new development pace, and existing book of business will make their new, less than four-year-old versions the versions users want, despite the license. Hashi's announcement and FAQs try to minimize perceived cost of the license change by emphasizing they intend no change for users, customers, and contributors, as distinct from product-service competitors. This new fork announcement tries to maximize uncertainty about the license and throw shade on future development prospects. It's all in the game. Customers can watch the runners run. Eat popcorn. I think it's highly unlikely Hashi's rivals will make enough marketing pain on this to force them to reverse the change. The database companies made far bigger moves, with more complexity and fewer marketing lessons learned. They held out. So the war's on the product dev and product marketing fronts. The real test will come in January, after Hashi says it will stop backporting fixes to the current MPL release. At that point, the rivals are under their own power only. Will any MPL-today-licensed fork be so competitive with Hashi's version at that point that customers bet on it over Hashi's long-term? It will have to bear its own development and maintenance costs for whatever differentiates it. I'm familiar with the products, but not an active user. My main question is whether there's substantial new development still to be done on the most popular projects, or whether it's really a maintenance war. I'd be looking for whether Hashi's new versions break compat, either tactically or as a consequence of new development.