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Comment by throwawaaarrgh | Hacker News Reader

So far it appears to be the same old thing with a different owner. Maintainers act like they own the thing and everyone else (read: the users, as opposed to the developers) can just suck it. Like the whole "enshittification of products" HN post, project doesn't actually care about the users. It's just a hedge for SaaS to have a more permissive license. They need us to adopt it, otherwise they will have to develop identical features to TF in their fork to maintain compatibility, indefinitely. Community definitely isn't the goal.

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Maybe that's true, but in the long run, I'll stick with the "community" of multiple SaaS providers all awkwardly sharing a permissive license than the one provider who took their ball and went home with it. Ultimately, the companies involved have to somewhat care about their users because the product needs to be good or no one will use it. The alternative is core Terraform or the first party's IaC options, which are all more closed and more don't care about the user.

Community may not be the #1 goal, but it's certainly on the list of things that has value about the project, both to the users and the maintainers.

> Maintainers act like they own the thing and everyone else (read: the users, as opposed to the developers) can just suck it.

> project doesn't actually care about the users

> Community definitely isn't the goal

Hey, OpenTofu Core team member here. I'm sorry that you feel that way. Is there anything specific that you'd change, or should be different in your opinion?

Being heavily community-driven (regarding issues chosen for implementation) is definitely one of our core goals, and it's a hard goal! We're still setting things up here and on the road to the first alpha release - your feedback would be very welcome and valuable. We do listen and strive to improve, we've just introduced weekly updates[0] based on community feedback.

[0]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/blob/main/WEEKLY_UPDATE...

I think a major benefit of open source is that it doesn’t require good intentions on the part of the maintainers. A consortium of maintainers ensures that none of them have the market power to change the license.

There should be additional maintainers that are not affiliated with Hashicorp competitors.

> So far it appears to be the same old thing with a different owner.

What a ridiculous point. Did you expect 15 new features a few weeks after the branch?

> project doesn't actually care about the users

And you know that because the haven't yet developed 100 new features?

A project like this needs a strong, opinionated approach.

I’ve seen too many wild “I wish Terraform did…” discussions with others to trust any form of democratic maintenance to work.

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