HashiCorp—HashiCorp switched Terraform and other tools from open source MPL to Business Source License
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.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| Open Source Licensing Integrity | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| Overall incident score = | -1.020 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (high ×1.5) × confidence (0.68)
Evidence (2 signals)
HashiCorp announced switch from MPL 2.0 to Business Source License
HashiCorp announced that future releases of Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Waypoint, and Boundary would use the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1, moving away from the open source Mozilla Public License. This prompted the community to fork Terraform as OpenTofu.
HashiCorp switched all products to BSL 1.1, prompting OpenTofu fork and Linux Foundation adoption
HashiCorp changed Terraform, Vault, Nomad and all products from MPL v2.0 to BSL v1.1 on August 10, 2023. Hundreds of businesses formed Open Terraform, published a manifesto, and forked as OpenTofu, accepted into the Linux Foundation September 2023.