How do you know you're not competing with HashiCorp?
That's not meant to be a redundant or snarky question. The key issue with the BSL and that FAQ is that the wording is intentionally vague. What does "competing" mean? What does "hosting or embedding" mean? Who decides?
In order to really know if you're a competitor, you have to reach out to HashiCorp (as the FAQ tells you to do). So whether your usage is valid is not controlled by the license terms, but is instead entirely at the whim of HashiCorp. So they switched from a permissive open source license to a HashiCorp decides license: they get to decide on a case by case basis now—and they can change their mind at any time.
That is very shaky footing on which to build anything.
That's not meant to be a redundant or snarky question. The key issue with the BSL and that FAQ is that the wording is intentionally vague. What does "competing" mean? What does "hosting or embedding" mean? Who decides?
In order to really know if you're a competitor, you have to reach out to HashiCorp (as the FAQ tells you to do). So whether your usage is valid is not controlled by the license terms, but is instead entirely at the whim of HashiCorp. So they switched from a permissive open source license to a HashiCorp decides license: they get to decide on a case by case basis now—and they can change their mind at any time.
That is very shaky footing on which to build anything.
See https://blog.gruntwork.io/the-future-of-terraform-must-be-op... for more info.