TL;DR: August 2023 is when HashiCorp flipped Terraform from MPL 2. 0 to the Business Source License (BSL 1.

📖 Reading time: ~33 min

What's in this article

Why We Started Looking for Alternatives in the First Place

The License Change That Made Our Legal Team Actually Read the Docs

The Tools I Actually Evaluated (and One I Dismissed Immediately)

My Shortlist and What I Cut Before Wasting Any Real Time

OpenTofu: The Closest Drop-In Replacement

What OpenTofu Actually Is (And Why the Licensing Matters)

Pulumi Free Tier: When You're Tired of HCL

Crossplane: For Teams Already Deep in Kubernetes

Why We Started Looking for Alternatives in the First Place

The License Change That Made Our Legal Team Actually Read the Docs

August 2023 is when HashiCorp flipped Terraform from MPL 2.0 to the Business Source License (BSL 1.1). I remember reading the announcement and thinking "okay, open core, whatever" — then actually reading the license text.…