Projects are free to choose permissive licenses like BSD.
Companies are then free to use the code however they like and not contribute back in any way.
Projects are then free to be annoyed by this because they hoped that companies would contribute time and/or resouces out their own good will.
Finally, projects are free to move to "business source" licenses because good will didn't work, so they need to utilize the legal system to ensure that large companies help sustain the project.
Describing changing to a source-available licenses as "now utilizing the legal system" is strange.
Projects choosing a permissive license like BSD is utilizing the legal system. BSD is a contract, a copyright license. It imposes restrictions/limitations/obligations, which can/would be enforced by a court.
Come on, you're unfairly quoting bits of my sentences in order to fuss over something unrelated to my point.
I said:
> so they need to utilize the legal system to ensure that large companies help sustain the project.
No shit they were using the legal system before with the BSD license. I am saying that they are now using the legal system to ensure companies contribute, which is not something the BSD license did.
Have you ever set lenient guidelines, people took advantage of them in a way you didn't like, so you were forced to tighten your guidelines in a way you didn't originally want to?
eg: a professor establishes a generous late homework policy, which most students use reasonably, except a few who decide to turn in everthing on the last day of the term and make the TA's lives hell. Prof is allowed to be disappointed and then adjust their future terms' policies to be more specific (eg "submit assignments max 5 days late").
For this analogy to work, it also needs to include the professor advertising their course and attracting good-will primarily on the basis of their generous policy, and then bait-and-switching involved participants when they later decided they didn't like it.
The professor could advertise their course this way for Term 1, realize their policy isn't working as intended, and then change their policy (and advertising) as of Term 2. That's not a bait and switch. There was no promise that their course would have the generous original policy in for all terms in perpetuity.
As far as I can tell, you are allowed to fork HashiCorp's code up until the point of license change, and continue to use it as you like, rebrand it as a new project, whatever. I could be wrong, but I don't think HashiCorp ever said "we will never ever change our license."
Ehh.. with terraform it's more like putting out a bootstrapped "need a penny, take a penny. have a penny, leave a penny" jar in front of the register, occasionally putting your own pennies into it (while other people leave theirs as well), then, after the jar starts to overflow, and you realized no one was giving your business extra money, you decide to take the jar (now a significant chunk of change, thanks in large part to the good will of others)
Because projects believ(ed) that the good will of their users would be enough to sustain their projects and businesses.
Now that certain projects see that good will isn't working, they're switching to the legal system.