Redis, HashiCorp, and Elastic's license switches from open source to source-available have fragmented critical infrastructure software and forced mass migration projects

Between 2023 and 2024, three of the most widely deployed open source infrastructure projects changed their licenses to restrict cloud provider usage: HashiCorp moved Terraform from MPL 2.0 to BSL 1.1 in August 2023, Redis switched from BSD to dual RSALv2/SSPLv1 in March 2024, and Elastic had previously moved from Apache 2.0 to dual SSPL/Elastic License. These licenses are not recognized as open source by the OSI. Why it matters: enterprises using these tools in cloud environments face sudden license compliance uncertainty, so engineering teams must evaluate whether to accept restrictive terms or migrate to forks (OpenTofu, Valkey, OpenSearch), so migration projects consume thousands of engineering hours that could go to product development, so the open source ecosystem fractures into competing incompatible forks with diverging feature sets, so companies that built their infrastructure on the promise of open source permanence lose trust in all open source projects' license stability. The structural root cause is that venture-funded open source companies face an irreconcilable conflict: they need permissive licenses to build community adoption but cannot sustain revenue when cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) offer managed versions of their software without contributing proportionally, and no legal or community mechanism exists to prevent a project's corporate steward from unilaterally changing the license.