[cjoelbrowning]

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.

[fishnchips]

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?

[cjoelbrowning]

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.

[fishnchips]

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.

[learningstud]

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