On August 10, 2023, HashiCorp made changes in their products: by now Terraform and others will be developed and distributed under Business Source License. I think this move will scare open source enthusiasts off.
Open source is a must. But open source is not about “free” software development. At all.
I think it’s about quality and reusability. First you develop on demand: pull requests, new bugs by strangers from whole the world arrived. You merge them and a new version of the product gets released.
How to make money on product in open area? Let me explain my thoughts on this.
I think the best way to do it is to leave your product “free” and open-source and sell services and service management on top of your product. HashiCorp is doing the same what I described, maintaining Terraform and selling Terraform Cloud or whatever.
While other companies like Spacelift, offer the same services as Terraform Cloud. In terms of business, HashiCorp doing everything OK by restricting license. So, for instance, Spacelift will be required to pay for Terraform usage after Terraform 1.6.
But along with that, Terraform and other HashiCorp open source products will lack off quality and enthusiasm in their repos. I’m not interested in contributing to the product that I can’t use if one day I decide to create some service that uses Terraform.
It’s sad.