OpenTofu Response to HashiCorp's Cease and Desist Letter

[JohnMakin]

> “for_each” implementation for “import” blocks,

Well, I'm officially on board with this project. We've been told this is impossible for years.

Seems like this is pretty air tight for OpenTofu, but cease and desist letters are usually hoping to intimidate you into action anyway.

edit: looks like I may have confused import blocks with provider blocks... please give me for_each support for provider blocks! please!

[cam72cam]

We are super excited to be implementing what the community has been asking about for years. It's what drives our core team.

[chucky_z]

You can do this really easily today with cdktf, I'd imagine there's some interop with opentofu there that's possible?

[eadmund]

Those of us who remember the SCO Group are probably tickled pink that ‘source code origination’ is apparently a term of art abbreviated ‘SCO.’

[rubyfan]

no doubt this is on purpose from whoever coined the acronym

[fishnchips]

Rule #32: Enjoy the Little Things

[mkdolan]

:-)

[fishnchips]

An official apology from the author of the article that sparked the entire discussion - https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1778454498664690108

It takes guts to publicly admit you were wrong.

[hermanradtke]

Until there is an update to the original article [0], I don't find this apology particular meaningful.

0: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3714980/opentofu-may-be-sh...

[atlas_hugged]

It does take guts to admit you were wrong. He didn’t though.

This is a non-apology, “apology”.

He says he was wrong about being so “strong.” Wtf? That’s not an apology at all.

His “analysis” was complete bullshit. Hilariously, in his “apology” he says “a few minutes of LGTM isn’t enough.” Then he adds a kind of “trust me bro” tidbit to counter the people that called him out for his few minutes of garbage analysis.

If he had anything ACTUALLY damning, he would have put it in the article. Instead he put the most vaguely related stuff and said “see! Smoking gun!”

This guy has credentials that make it obvious he should know better. Yet he’s still basically saying he was only wrong in tone.

I don’t get his motive. Is he personally involved with Hashicorp or something? Is he friends with an executive? It doesn’t make sense to me at all, unless there’s some other motive he’s not talking about.

He tried to make it sound like “I have an honest concern.” To me it just sounds like it could very well be a stealth PR campaign from some Hashicorp lawyer that backfired immediately. Reminds me of the crap they pull in the entertainment industry.

That’s my rant. These opinions are my own, yada yada.

[levlaz]

Yeah, that is fair, its better than nothing. But he could have also done the thing that every other good journalist does and ask both sides for comment instead of speculating for 1000 words.

[DinoDad13]

Weird strategy from Hashicorp. The amount of code that they claimed was infringed is tiny. And from what I can tell, is not algorithmically significant. It's such small ball.

[rajishx]

I think matt has lost any credibility he had i have been following since openstack and the beginning of containers days and it has all been downhill from there...

[bryceneal]

What is HashiCorp's goal here? Don't they realize how bad of a look this is?

[atlas_hugged]

Hah! I knew that previous article smelled like a poorly researched hit piece on OpenTofu!

[yellow_lead]

Smells like stinky tofu (臭豆腐）

[pnw]

Unforced error by Hashicorp. Did an engineer even review this code?

[cjoelbrowning]

The argument OpenTofu and their lawyers are making is that they didn’t copy the “removed” statement, which is under the new BUSL license, they looked at the “moved” statement (licensed originally under MPL) and derived their own removed statement from that. Maybe true but I can’t help but wonder if there was any “parallel construction” involved.

If you look at the PR in OpenTofu: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/pull/1158

It claims to fix this issue: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1032

Which in turn references this issue in terraform: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/34402

I’m not a lawyer and have no idea who is right or wrong but I understand why Hashicorp is scrutinizing this.

[fishnchips]

Scrutinizing the fact that a PR links to an issue that links to an issue on another public repo, opened by what I understand to be a community member? I mean, who's going to stop them, right?