HashiCorp—HashiCorp relicensed core products from MPL 2.0 to Business Source License after building community on permissive license
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.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate Transparency | -against | secondary | -0.50 |
| Open Source | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| Open Source Licensing Integrity | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| Overall incident score = | -0.737 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (high ×1.5) × confidence (0.59)
Evidence (1 signal)
HashiCorp relicensed Terraform, Vault and other core products to Business Source License, prompting OpenTofu fork
HashiCorp's August 10, 2023 corporate announcement and CEO statements detailed the relicensing of all primary products from MPL 2.0 to BSL 1.1. The Linux Foundation and major vendors responded by forking Terraform as OpenTofu within weeks.