The providers need a “driver.” Without that, they aren’t very useful as is. That’s the danger. (Yes, pulumi, etc)

Additionally, HashiCorp changed the terms of service on the registry, making it only acceptable to use the official terraform binaries to download modules or providers.

Now, the providers are mostly open source, so, it was never impossible to recreate the thing—just work. But the point here is that Hashicorp took steps that caused the community of terraform users to recognize that closing off the ecosystem would have a tremendous impact on devops.

That’s why there was so much outrage and immediate action taken.