The Biggest Rugpull in Programming History

HashiCorp's 2023 decision to switch Terraform from an open-source license to a Business Source License sparked major controversy. Competitors could no longer use Terraform for commercial products, prompting developers to fork the project and launch OpenTofu under the Linux Foundation. Eight months later, HashiCorp was acquired by IBM for $6.4 billion, leading many to speculate the license change was a deliberate move to clean up the business for sale. The episode highlights how fragile open-source community trust can be — one license change and the community rebuilds the project independently.