before you "do a HashiCorp": what a license change actually costs you

since HashiCorp moved Terraform and its other tools to the Business Source License in 2023, and Redis changed its license in 2024, I get asked roughly monthly whether skerry will "go commercial". short answer: no. long answer, because the question deserves a real one and the topic is full of hot takes with no cost attached.

what these companies actually did

HashiCorp (2023) moved from the Mozilla Public License to the BSL, a source available license that forbids using the software to compete with HashiCorp. the community forked the last open version as OpenTofu, which is now under the Linux Foundation. Redis (2024) dropped its open source BSD license for a dual SSPL/RSAL arrangement, aimed squarely at the cloud providers reselling it; the community and some of the original maintainers forked it as Valkey, which Amazon, Google and others backed. in both cases: a venture backed company, pressure to monetise cloud usage, a license change, and an immediate fork carrying the old community away.

the pattern

• these are not "open source projects". they are companies whose product happened to be open source, which is a completely different animal with completely different incentives. a VC does not fund a gift to the commons.
• the stated enemy is always "the hyperscalers reselling our work without contributing". that grievance is often legitimate. the solution punishes every small user too.
• the fork is nearly automatic now. OpenTofu and Valkey existed within weeks. the community has learned that a license is a promise and will leave the moment it is broken.
• "source available" is not open source. you can read it. you cannot necessarily use it the way you planned. those are different freedoms and conflating them deliberately is how the PR is written.

why skerry will not do this

I am not a company. there is no VC asking me to ten-x revenue. skerry is a hobby that became infrastructure, and its whole value is that it is boring, permissive and unchanging, so people can ship it in a car and forget it. if I changed the license tomorrow, every current user keeps the version they have under the old terms (that is how licenses work, you cannot revoke a grant already given), they fork the last permissive commit, and I have burned fourteen years of trust for nothing. the only thing a license change would buy me is the thing I least want: drama.

if you maintain something funded by a company, this will land on your desk eventually and it is genuinely hard, I am not mocking the people who did it. but understand what you are spending. you are not changing a license, you are ending one community and daring it to start another without you. sometimes that is the right call. it is never a free one.