The infrastructure-as-code licence dispute consumed an enormous amount of attention and changed the practical situation for almost nobody. This chapter says precisely what it restricts, then covers the changes that actually matter and got a fraction of the coverage.

In August 2023 Terraform moved from the Mozilla Public Licence to the Business Source Licence 1.1. Since IBM completed its acquisition of HashiCorp in February 2025, the licensor named in that file is IBM. The specifics are more boring than the discourse:

• Only one thing is prohibited: producing a competitive offering — embedding the product in something you sell that competes with the vendor's commercial products.
• Explicitly permitted: all internal organisational use, including hosting it as an internal service for your own company. All non-production use. Consulting services helping others run it. Open-source projects that are not themselves competitive.
• Versions released before the change remain permissively licensed forever. The relicensing is not retroactive.
• And each version converts to MPL 2.0 four years after its own publication — a rolling change date, not a single one — so 1.6.0 becomes open again in 2027.
• The bottom line: if you run it to manage your own infrastructure, you are unaffected. The people genuinely affected are the vendors selling competing managed services. That distinction is routinely muddled and worth stating flatly.

OpenTofu — MPL 2.0, under the Linux Foundation — ships frequently and is drop-in compatible. It has also diverged in ways worth knowing:

• Native state and plan encryption at rest, with pluggable key providers. The Terraform binary has no equivalent, and given that state files contain generated secrets in clear text — as covered in the infrastructure-as-code chapter — this is a substantive difference rather than a feature-list entry.
• Early variable evaluation, iteration over provider blocks, an exclusion flag, and registry support over container registries.
• And the migration trap: state files are interchangeable between the two until you enable state encryption. Once OpenTofu writes an encrypted state, Terraform cannot read it. That is the practical point of no return and most migration guides bury it in a footnote.

On the last row: the upstream configuration-management tool remains freely licensed and unchanged; the commercial platform on top is sold per managed node with no published list price. The licensing boundary catches people — the certified content collections and the execution-environment base images are the licensed part, not the command-line tool, and teams discover this when an air-gapped build tries to pull from a licensed registry.

The licence drama was mostly noise, and the signal was elsewhere. A wrapper died, a control plane rewrote its model, and the commercial model changed from per-seat to per-resource. Being able to say that — and to explain why the licence genuinely does not restrict ordinary use — is a much better answer than a strong opinion about the licence, because it demonstrates that you read the terms rather than the commentary.