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Comment by fishnchips | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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