You can continue to use plain Terraform forever. It would only affect you if you use a tool like Env0, spacelift, Gruntwork pipelines, etc instead of something like the Terraform Cloud.

These tools are not going to be able to be used with users using new Terraform versions (though they can always use the current or any previous versions, or can use their fork these companies are jointly supporting).

Then there are open source tools that don't directly compete with Hashicorp that are in a bit of a gray area, but I've seen Atlantis, Pulumi, OTF, and other tools all claim that this does not affect them. I would presume this could also apply to things like Terratest, Terragrunt, etc. but I don't know. I am not a lawyer.

And if none of these company/product names are familiar to you, then you shouldn't have any noticeable difference :)

It doesn't. And it will not make any difference. The same way as Sentry license, Elasticsearch, etc., doesn't have any difference for regular users. Those changes target cloud providers like Amazon, Google, etc.

It means that whether you can use Terraform at any future company you work for will be determined... by HashiCorp.

That's because the BSL license is intentionally vague. What does "competing" mean? What does "hosting or embedding" mean? Who decides?

In order to really know if you're a competitor, you have to reach out to HashiCorp (as the FAQ tells you to do). So whether your usage is valid is not controlled by the license terms, but is instead entirely at the whim of HashiCorp. So they switched from a permissive open source license to a HashiCorp decides license: they get to decide on a case by case basis now—and they can change their mind at any time.

That is very shaky footing on which to build anything.

And the legal team at every company you work for will have to take that into account before deciding you can or can't use Terraform.

See https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-op... for more info.

It will affect categories of business users (programmers) who currently embrace terraform: amazon, google, microsoft, oracle, alibaba cloud.

Like it or not, cohorts of engineering organizations like the above (cloud providers) have a very outsized weight and already have contender products they can choose to vigorously fund tomorrow.

From the article:

The license does not allow you to use Terraform if you meet both of the following conditions: You are building a product that is competitive with HashiCorp. You embed or host Terraform in your product.

My $0.02: the management of hashicorp is following a stupid trend and should have thought about their customers more.

It will come out to what lawyers think, I guess. Lawyers usually say no to things with poorly established precedent.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but if I use TF in a Petstore-as-a-Service to provision new machines for my users, does that not count as embedding TF? So if HashiCorp decides to do Petstore-as-a-Service tomorrow, no matter how shitty the offering, no matter how insincere, even if it's just a single intern working on it, I would have to, overnight, rip TF out of my entire offering, no?

IANAL but it doesn’t seem like much, unless you’re planning on building a terraform-as-a-service company to compete directly with hashicorp. Honestly I’m not surprised given hashicorp’s enterprise offering are basically just… hosting the .tfstate file for you? I still can’t figure out what their upsell is.

Not much, right now.

Long term? Possibly less adoption (teams may elect to go with Pulumi or some other alternatives), less 3rd party tooling available (what if Hashicorp decides your tool is their competitor?), etc.

It seems very similar to the spat that community had with Red Hat with how 3rd party captures too much value from their own internal offering and leadership responds by changing the license model and makes things less open-source-y. Perhaps this will become the new normal for OSS/former OSS? IDK.

As a regular end-user, the main difference in the licenses is that it forks the ecosystem. If the fork goes ahead, and you were using some HashiCorp products and some software that is moving to OpenTF, eventually you won't be able to use that combination of tools any more. So you will have to pick what license you are going with, even if you don't care about the license directly.

I think you will be affected by the bigger picture. Mongo did this move also but there they were mostly in control before and after. Here there is a huge community of plugins. If before AWS shared a provider without hesitating, now they will ask themselves why contribute to a closed and possibly competitor garden.

It depends on what you're using it for, and whether it competes with anything Hashicorp does -- or might do in the future. If you can guarantee that's "none", you're in the clear. But as the man said, prediction is hard, especially about the future.

this is similar to other opencore debacles, Hashicorp wants you to use their managed Terraform rather than someone else's integration. This means that if you choose TF today for you managing your IaC you'll potentially be locked into using Hashi products down the road. The community is all but guaranteed to fork TF which means that over time the two forks will diverge and you'll have a bad time when trying to read docs, debug, contribute fixes.