TL;DR: August 2023 is when HashiCorp flipped Terraform from MPL 2. 0 to the Business Source License (BSL 1. 📖 Reading time: ~33 min What's in this article Why We Started Looking for Alternatives in the First Place The License Change That Made Our Legal Team Actually Read the Docs The Tools I Actually Evaluated (and One I Dismissed Immediately) My Shortlist and What I Cut Before Wasting Any Real Time OpenTofu: The Closest Drop-In Replacement What OpenTofu Actually Is (And Why the Licensing Matters) Pulumi Free Tier: When You're Tired of HCL Crossplane: For Teams Already Deep in Kubernetes Why We Started Looking for Alternatives in the First Place The License Change That Made Our Legal Team Actually Read the Docs August 2023 is when HashiCorp flipped Terraform from MPL 2.0 to the Business Source License (BSL 1.1). I remember reading the announcement and thinking "okay, open core, whatever" — then actually reading the license text.…