Infrastructure automation company known for Terraform, Vault, Consul, and other DevOps tools. Co-founded by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar. Controversially switched from open source to Business Source License in 2023. Acquired by IBM for $6.4 billion in 2025.
In August 2023, HashiCorp relicensed Terraform, Vault, Consul, and other products from the Mozilla Public License (open source) to the Business Source License (not open source). The move prompted the creation of OpenTofu, a community fork. Mitchell Hashimoto was an individual contributor at the time, not in a leadership role making this decision.
On August 10, 2023, HashiCorp changed the license for Terraform, Vault, and 6 other projects from Mozilla Public License (open source) to Business Source License (BSL), which restricts commercial use for 4 years. The change sparked immediate backlash: 33,000+ developers starred an Open Terraform Manifesto, 140+ companies pledged support for a fork, and on September 20, 2023, the Linux Foundation accepted OpenTofu as an official project. In April 2024, HashiCorp sent OpenTofu a cease-and-desist letter claiming code misuse.
On August 10, 2023 HashiCorp announced it was relicensing all of its primary products including Terraform, Vault, Consul, Boundary, Nomad and Vagrant from the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL) v1.1, which restricts commercial competitive use. The move was widely criticised as a bait-and-switch after 11 years of building community on open-source licenses, and prompted the OpenTofu fork of Terraform by the Linux Foundation and dozens of vendors. The episode mirrored similar relicensings by MongoDB, Redis, Elastic and CockroachDB.