OpenTerraform – an MPL fork of Terraform after HashiCorp's license change

Hashicorp switched Terraform from MPL to BSL yesterday. Many other companies did that in the past to prevent others taking their code and charging for running it as a managed service (eg Mongo, Elastic). With Hashi however, the server-side part was never open-source to start with. There was no such thing as "open-source Terraform Server". And now it seems that any commercial product that uses the Terraform language under the hood is at risk of violating the terms of the license. Funny enough, our own product (Digger, an open-source CI runner for Terraform) is not using Terraform (or any other Hashicorp's code) under the hood. So this change probably hits other TACOS (Spacelift, Env0) much harder than us. But with the recent pricing changes and now the license there is no guarantee that Hashicorp won't make another move in the future that would one way or another hurt us. So if there was an MPL fork, we'd rather swith to that, just to stay on the safe side. And since there isn't one yet, we thought why not make one?

they might well be! As well as all other TACO providers eg Spacelift, Scalr, Env0

Yes we are competing in the same market; customers using Spacelift probably wont be using Digger and vice versa. But we feel like having a community-friendly fork would benefit everyone, without harming anyone.

Hopefully they can finally add the ability to initiate providers ad-hoc, such that you can create environments and then configure those afterwards in one go.

The Terraform language should not be impacted by the license change any more than the GCC license impacts code it compiles (for example). I'd love to hear any assertions to the contrary.

Unclear how that would work in practice to me without some shitty half followed standards