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 accurate statement.<p>I wonder how viable this fork will end up being. To contrast with the recent Redis debacle, Redis is by some measure a completed piece of software, as suggested by the Redict fork. But with the moving target of the Cloud, is Terraform in a similar bucket? Will there be enough support behind this fork 5 years from now? And by support I don't mean is some big tech company's logo displayed on the website - are there multiple contributors or is it some random person in Nebraska doing what they can during evenings and weekends?<p>Might be an unfair comparison, but I'm reminded of the Reddit API uproar last year. It did what exactly? Reddit IPO'd, got their cake, the people who threw up their arms got what? Some maybe left, others just quietly returned to their corners of Reddit and continued using it? Will these large publicity forks end up being healthy and viable or end up open-source abandonware that once promised the world?<p>To be clear, I'm all for competition, FOSS, and all the stuff. I just genuinely worry about big bang, high publicity stuff. Is it big bang and then a quiet whimper, or a self sustaining entity for the long term?
Hey, OpenTofu core team-member here. I'd like to leave a note on what seems to have caused a lot of the confusion in this article.<p>The copyright headers in the new files are necessary because we sometimes need to move around code from older files.<p>For more information you can see this issue: <a href="https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/454#issuecomment-1904213569">https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/454#issuecomment...</a>
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.<p>I didn't spend time looking at the others as I felt the argument as put forth was already weak.<p>I'd suggest comparing yourself and not assuming that the author's points are all valid.
Beyond the license issue, the promised features vs. difficulty of implementing them is a knife in the 'if you don't like it, it's open source -- you can do anything you want'.<p>It's a technically correct statement. But that is all it is.
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:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1778454498664690108" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1778454498664690108</a>
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 contributing code to Open Source project