It should serve as a warning for companies who want to leverage the open source community but then do a rugpull
That is why OpenTF is on its way to CNCF. To ensure it stays OSS forever.
There is a difference between "true OSS" like K8s, OPA, etc and "temporary OSS" (backed by a company) like what Terraform used to be, Pulumi, GitLab ,etc. Those can be changed in the future.
When developers chose OSS, they should consider if it is a CNCF OSS or a vendor backed OSS. What Hashi did is an important example.
(disclaimer - env0 founder here, co-lead the OpenTF initiative)
https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumi-hearts-opensource/
Disclaimer: the following is my own opinion as an engineer at Pulumi.
Pulumi is true open source, with a relationship similar to git and the many SaaS services that layer on top of git to provide meaningful value.
To contrast with our competitor, Pulumi relies on open source languages and protocols. We could not, even if we wanted to, change the Python license. Nor could we change our protocols without breaking our users and our growing ecosystem.
That's the value of building on open protocols and standard languages.
But our philosophy at OpenTF is that users would rather participate in an open ecosystem where multiple vendors compete for their business. If you're not happy with one vendor, you can easily switch to another; competition works to make all vendors better.
When we look back at this comment a year from now, I'll wonder how your company will feel about the responsiveness and new features they're getting from Terraform Cloud when the primary incentive to stay is not because you think it's the best product available, but because switching costs are so painful.
Eventually they saw the writing on the wall and moved to Linux systems and replaced all of the hardware, and have an enterprise RHEL subscription that we could call when needed.
I think the story is going to be the same with the current company, mainly "who can we blame if there is a security incident, or get me a Hashicorp person on the phone if we have some kind of Terraform related production issue." Having this in place seems to matter more than everything else honestly.
I would like to see more companies that leverage open-source contribute back to the very community that enables their value creation.
I have come around to the idea that it's good to firmly discourage this kind of late-in-the-game license change.
But I also think that, on net, this episode will lead to fewer businesses choosing the open source model for their software, from the start. It just seems like playing business on hard mode to try to build an open source or source available product, when you can just build a SaaS and charge for it. I think this is really bad (I have a strong preference to not be stuck with opaque SaaSes for most things), and I'm not sure what incentive there is to try to find new business models, when you risk becoming public enemy number one amongst a big chunk of your potential customer base.