TL;DR: The BSL change hit differently than most license drama. In August 2023, HashiCorp moved Terraform from the Mozilla Public License 2.

📖 Reading time: ~34 min

What's in this article

Why I Started Looking for Terraform Alternatives (And You Probably Should Too)

The Candidates I Actually Tested

OpenTofu: The Closest Drop-In If You're Already on Terraform

Pulumi: When You're Tired of Fighting HCL

Crossplane: IaC That Lives Inside Your Kubernetes Cluster

Ansible: Don't Dismiss It for Cloud Provisioning

Side-by-Side Comparison: What Actually Matters

When to Pick What: Matching the Tool to Your Actual Situation

Why I Started Looking for Terraform Alternatives (And You Probably Should Too)

The BSL change hit differently than most license drama. In August 2023, HashiCorp moved Terraform from the Mozilla Public License 2.0 to the Business Source License 1.1 — and the key clause is this one: you can't use Terraform to build a product that competes with HashiCorp.…