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Comment by spooneybarger | Hacker News Reader

I diffed one of the example files. I don't see clear copying. It looked at a moderate glance to be a different implementation of similar functionality.

I didn't spend time looking at the others as I felt the argument as put forth was already weak.

I'd suggest comparing yourself and not assuming that the author's points are all valid.

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I had a skim as well, and they're substantially different. Sure there will be some similarities since they're trying to achieve the exact same results given equal inputs but I don't know how you could qualify OpenTofu's code as "copy-paste and change the license".

These types of things are very hard to definitively prove one way or the other. I was once loudly accused of plagiarizing someone's answer on Stack Overflow. And they were right, the answers were very similar – the code was near-identical and even some of the verbiage of the explanation was quite similar.

Luckily I was able to prove my innocence quite conclusively as my answer was several months older that theirs. Whoops! We had a laugh about it and it all ended well, but it's a nice example on how two strangers can arrive at very similar code.

Should probably look at the original commit in the PR, rather than the current state of the repo. There's quite a bit of feedback on that PR and there may have been other changes since: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/pull/1158/commits

It's certainly not a blind copy/paste, but I find it very hard to say if it's a reworked version of terraform or a clean re-implementation. I think both are possible, or something in-between: they looked at the terraform patch to see what approach they took, went "ah right, that approach will work", and then implemented their own patch "from scratch". Is that legal? Probably. Is it moral? Well, you decide.

OpenTofu already requires a Developer Certificate of Origin: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.... – basically we have to believe people are not lying when they say they're the author. While there are perhaps some eye-brow raising bits of code here and there, I think the current evidence is not even close to strong enough to call people liars.

The author is paid to make these articles, it is his job to make these points, valid or not. "Infoworld" is putting itself as an outlet for corporate propaganda providing a sneaky disclaimer at the bottom.

Did the same with the same conclusion.

Take a look at the actual commit history. It's clear copying the BUSL files and then changing things.

https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/pull/1158/commits

I see lots of new activity in there, including reviews and feedback etc. What makes you feel they are copied?

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