The Open Source Trap: Why Free Software Is the Most Expensive Choice You'll Make

The Open Source Trap: Why Free Software Is the Most Expensive Choice You'll Make In 2023, HashiCorp changed Terraform's license from MPL 2.0 to BSL 1.1. One line in a CHANGELOG. That single line triggered an estimated $600 million in enterprise re-tooling costs across the industry. Companies that had built their entire infrastructure automation on Terraform -- thousands of modules, years of institutional knowledge, CI/CD pipelines hardwired to terraform plan -- woke up to discover that "free" had a price tag after all. I was one of those people. Not at the $600M scale, obviously. But I had Terraform wired into everything. Dozens of modules. Custom providers. A deployment pipeline that assumed Terraform would always be there, always be open, always be free. I was wrong about that. And I've been wrong about open source economics for most of my career. This is what I've learned since. The Rug Pull Hall of Fame Let's start with the receipts. These aren't hypotheticals. These are things tha