OpenTofu Response to HashiCorp's Cease and Desist Letter | Hacker News Reader

OpenTofu Response to HashiCorp's Cease and Desist Letter

opentofu.org

149 pointsaofeisheng30 comments

> “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!

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

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

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

no doubt this is on purpose from whoever coined the acronym

Rule #32: Enjoy the Little Things

:-)

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.

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...

It's not even been an hour...

You're not wrong, for sure. I hope this happens, too. But it's still more than most "experts" are capable of.

For me the smelliest part of this is the timestamps. The C&D is dated April 3. The InfoWorld article is timestamped 8:49 AM PDT, the same day, and the files called out in both places are the exact same five. There is no way I can see that the article wasn't just a rehash of a draft C&D provided to Matt Asay before it was even delivered to the OpenTofu project, and without either HashiCorp or Asay giving OpenTofu a chance to respond. Even if the C&D were 100% justified (and it's clearly not), that is extremely dirty pool.

It's been updated, but frankly they need to put out an entirely new article discussing how this first article came out in the first place. If this is something Hashicorp pushed to them, and they decided to publish it without seeking comment from OpenTofu first, that's really inappropriate and needs to be disclosed. Further, they owe it to everyone involved to give the same amount of attention to the OpenTofu response as they did the initial accusation, which means more than just one paragraph.

There is an update already:

"Update: Since this article was published, HashiCorp sent OpenTofu a cease-and-desist letter on April 3, 2024, expressing in greater detail the concerns raised in this post. On April 11, 2024, the OpenTofu maintainers responded with a detailed analysis of the claims made about the removed block. Based on these documents, it appears that the OpenTofu community did not misappropriate HashiCorp’s intellectual property."

There wasn't at the time the concern was raised, and the author was literally refusing to do so.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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

Smells like stinky tofu (臭豆腐）

heh, clever pun. but hardly. have you tried it? stinky tofu doesn't smell as bad as its reputation. and it tastes great. stinky tofu doesn't hold a candle to durian or some of the more pungent cheeses. of course this comment is coming from a guy who likes those cheeses, and durian, so YMMV. my biggest gripe about stinky tofu is that it isn't stinky enough.

I've been in Taipei for a while and still think it's pretty stinky, but I don't mind the taste too much haha

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

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.

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?

OpenTofu PR’d a feature in response to a request to do what Terraform had done under a different license. Hashicorp would be foolish not to look into it.

And here's where we agree. They totally should have had people look into it. Competent people, engineers. Would've saved them the current embarrassment.

The engineers most likely have looked into it. Most likely, it's the legal department and higher ups that decided to push through.

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