Think how difficult it is to get most companies to listen to your needs, much less ship what you need, versus being able to contribute your own pull request and have it merged.
Why should this mean the source owner deserves any less of a product revenue than the company that won't let you add your own features? It shouldn't.
If you get your feature merged at the long end of a customer relationship / product manager interaction, do you expect that means you should get paid for your feature request or get to keep it? If you write the spec for your feature in code instead of a PowerPoint or Word doc, so it does what you need exactly right, you're still asking them to ship a feature you need, just better specified and delivered sooner. It lowers the overhead both firms waste, which lowers your licensing cost and your cost of delay.
From the viewpoint of a CTO of a mega enterprise -- a vendor that lets me make things work is worth more per month to me than a vendor that won't, and no, I don't expect my enterprise get paid for the vendor accepting the fix that scratches my particular itch.
I have not and will not sign anything which assigns copyright for OSS (even to the FSF), so it will be interesting to see whether all of that code has been rewritten.
I think what you say is factually correct, but maybe misrepresents the situation a bit.
The license automatically converts to full open-source after 4 years. Maybe this isn't ideal, but it isn't "big company takes your code and locks it away forever" either.
And if I understand the license correctly, you're perfectly free to use the software in your own open-source projects, and your commercial projects unless they're a re-packaging of Hashicorp's own, etc. We shouldn't act like this is an evil business decision, or like this is morally equivalent to proprietary software that does stay proprietary forever with no apology or caveats.
As a restriction added to something previously open, it’s horrendous. AGPL would be better.
If I contribute to something with a permissive license then it doesn't prevent the company from releasing new versions of the project under the BSL. The only restrictions on the permissive license is the copyright notices have to be included.
Aside from that, there's still value in contributing to a product you're consuming at your day job: not having to maintain forks. If you can get your feature into the upstream project, less work for you in the long run, it's a win win.
Should you contribute to corporate owned projects in your free time for the fun of it? Probably not, unless you think it will earn you some kind of recognition (resume fodder).
Currently moving from Traefik to APISIX.