The main motivation here is to produce a helpful error if a user
incorrectly uses the terraform-provider- prefix (which we see on provider
VCS repositories and plugin executables) as part of the source address.
However, this also more broadly blocks "terraform-" as a prefix in
anticipation of whatever instinct causes the phenomenon where e.g.
Python's PyPI has thousands of packages whose names start with "python-",
even though everything on PyPI is for Python by definition. This is
definitely not _necessary_, but it's better to be restrictive at first
and weaken later as needed.
Martin Atkins