Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

infoworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

#31

Post by PeterZaitsev »

emestifs wrote: post #21

I have no horse in the race, but as an outside observer, and involved in some small open source stuff, I find it interesting the dynamics of these kinds of large public events and forks. Looking at the contributor activity from Aug 13th 2023 to today, there seems to be slightly less activity in the OpenTofu repo vs the original Terraform repo, but small sample size and just eyeballing it, don't take this as an accura…

I think comparing number of contributors is not the point here. I would not be surprised if Hashicorp can put more people on their proprietary heavily modified version, and it will be more advanced. Yet the Open Source version can be good enough, and prefered for 95% of folks out there

Re: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

#32

Post by sausagefeet »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #30

I think the great lesson here is this - if Fork is where to compete with Proprietary Source Available software, it is likely it will need to implement a lot of similar functionality and to avoid potential problems it is very important there is a process of "clean room" implementation. I would consider asking developers to speficially attest they have not been looking at the visible but proprietary implementation when…

The OpenTofu developers take tremendous care in ensuring that no code comes from Terraform post-license change.

The claims in this post are just absolutely nonsense and if you look at diffs of the files given, they look a lot different to me. This article is a Gish gallop of public relations.

Re: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

#33

Post by historynops »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #31
emestifs wrote: post #21

I have no horse in the race, but as an outside observer, and involved in some small open source stuff, I find it interesting the dynamics of these kinds of large public events and forks. Looking at the contributor activity from Aug 13th 2023 to today, there seems to be slightly less activity in the OpenTofu repo vs the original Terraform repo, but small sample size and just eyeballing it, don't take this as an accura…

I think comparing number of contributors is not the point here. I would not be surprised if Hashicorp can put more people on their proprietary heavily modified version, and it will be more advanced. Yet the Open Source version can be good enough, and prefered for 95% of folks out there

My question is, how do Env0, Spacelift, and other Terraform automation and collaboration tool vendors make money if they make OpenTofu so good that it's preferred for 95% of folks out there? Do they fight over the support money scraps?

Re: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

#34

Post by fishnchips »

historynops wrote: post #33
PeterZaitsev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think comparing number of contributors is not the point here. I would not be surprised if Hashicorp can put more people on their proprietary heavily modified version, and it will be more advanced. Yet the Open Source version can be good enough, and prefered for 95% of folks out there

My question is, how do Env0, Spacelift, and other Terraform automation and collaboration tool vendors make money if they make OpenTofu so good that it's preferred for 95% of folks out there? Do they fight over the support money scraps?

Git being better does not make GitHub bankrupt. They operate on different layers.

Re: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

#35

Post by sausagefeet »

historynops wrote: post #33
PeterZaitsev wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think comparing number of contributors is not the point here. I would not be surprised if Hashicorp can put more people on their proprietary heavily modified version, and it will be more advanced. Yet the Open Source version can be good enough, and prefered for 95% of folks out there

My question is, how do Env0, Spacelift, and other Terraform automation and collaboration tool vendors make money if they make OpenTofu so good that it's preferred for 95% of folks out there? Do they fight over the support money scraps?

Env0, Spacelift, and (my company) Terrateam compete with Terraform Cloud not Terraform. Terraform and OpenTofu are CLIs that turn HCL code into living infrastructure. The business model of these offerings, including TFC, is to provide the layer most organizations need above that, such as collaboration, interfacing with VCS, etc.

Re: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

#36

Post by jkaplowitz »

tsimionescu wrote: post #23
jkaplowitz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article shows a HashiCorp copyright notice coupled with an MPL license header for a file that was never released by HashiCorp under the MPL. How is that biased and misleading?

If you look at the commit history, the reviewers actually asked why the files have the HashiCorp copyright, and it seems that the developers were not sure what is the final copyright notice for new code. The one they settled on recognizes copyright both from HashiCorp and the OpenTofu foundation, as even the new files are probably deemed to be derived works of HashiCorp. Here is the comment I'm mentioning: https://gi…

Thanks for that additional context. Still, there are enough other parallels with BUSL-only Hashicorp code, including several identical new filenames, that the questions raised by the article seem fair as questions to me. I don’t think the article claims to answer them more definitively than initial speculation.

(That is, the article is noting a bunch of observations and saying what it looks like to the author, explicitly without firmly asserting any underlying truth.)

At the very least, a court would probably send an infringement lawsuit on this basis to trial, surviving an initial motion to dismiss, regardless of what the eventual verdict might be after full fact-finding.

Re: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

#37

Post by Igalze »

Just to update on how this continued to unfold, following a detailed response by the OpenTofu team, this is the official statement by Matt Aasy the author of the article, apologizing and acknowledging that he was wrong to rush to conclusions:

https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1778454498664690108

Post reply on HN