Terraform Lock-In Is Real: Here's How to Get Out

Terraform Lock-In Is Real: Here's How to Get Out The License Change That Made Lock-In Visible In August 2023, HashiCorp quietly changed everything. Terraform moved from the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0) to the Business Source License (BSL 1.1). The new license prohibits using Terraform to build a competing product. For most engineering teams, that restriction meant nothing in practice. But the change did something more important: it made visible how dependent the infrastructure world had become on a single vendor's tool. Teams that had been writing HCL for three years suddenly had a reason to ask: what would it take to leave? The answer, for most of them, was uncomfortable. Within a month of the BSL announcement, a community fork appeared under the Linux Foundation. OpenTofu reached general availability in January 2024. The speed of the fork was remarkable. The reason was simple: the infrastructure community had built too much on Terraform to let a license dispute make it a dead end