TL;DR: The BSL switch blindsided a lot of teams because it wasn't a "you can't use this anymore" announcement — it was more subtle than that. HashiCorp relicensed Terraform from MPL 2.

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The Problem: Terraform's BSL License Change Broke Our Pipeline Planning

The BSL switch blindsided a lot of teams because it wasn't a "you can't use this anymore" announcement — it was more subtle than that. HashiCorp relicensed Terraform from MPL 2.0 to the Business Source License starting with v1.6, and the specific clause that made our legal team nervous was this: you can't use Terraform to build a product that competes with HashiCorp . That sounds fine until your company builds internal developer platforms, sells managed cloud services, or runs a CI/CD product as part of a larger offering. Suddenly "are we competing?" becomes a real legal question, not a rhetorical one.

The friction for my team wasn't day-one usage — we kept shipping without interruption.…