IMHO that is because the argument is generally about free vs open source, when really what people often want is more of an open and reciprocating community. Th

IMHO that is because the argument is generally about free vs open source, when really what people often want is more of an open and reciprocating community. The ability for multiple vendors to coexist as peers is a strong signal that it is possible for anyone to come and both give and take to the level of their desires and needs (within generally fair ground rules). Foundations like Apache will often push for incubated projects to be maintained by participants from more than 1-2 companies before they will accept them as full-fledge, "graduated" projects. Commercial vendors may also change their terms from time to time, such as at contract renewal. However when you have a public-facing project, you may be affecting more than than your relationship with your individual customers, but relationships with the community as a whole. The multi-vendor forks of Terraform and Redis do illustrate these other vendors see tremendous value in that community, to the point where they'll try to move the existing community over to a new project. And why not? Companies like Amazon doesn't rely on renting out key/value data stores as their primary revenue source, but a community around that data store makes the corresponding product much more valuable. This is why creating a company around making an open source product is so hard - it is easy (via maintained control) to have a symbiotic relationship with the project you created and corresponding community turn parasitic. > Personally, I’m grateful these project made their source open for so long. The alternative would not be AGPL terraform, it would be completely closed terraform. Projects like Terraform do not work without massive community involvement in building providers and providing guidance and samples around manifests. In some cases, products have even built API around the need to write a Terraform provider. That sort of community growth and involvement around a closed source platform is exceedingly rare. The alternative to an open source Terraform would have most likely have been a failed Terraform project.