https://thenewstack.io/ibm-hashicorp-sunsets-terraforms-external-language-support/

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nu/post/4403233

On April 3rd, we received a Cease and Desist letter from HashiCorp regarding our implementation of the "removed" block in OpenTofu, claiming copyright infringement on the part of one of our core developers. We were also made aware of an article posted that same day with the same accusations. We have investigated these claims and are publishing the C&D letter, our response and the source code origin document resulting from our investigation.

The OpenTofu team vehemently disagrees with any suggestion that it misappropriated, mis-sourced, or otherwise misused HashiCorp’s BSL code. All such statements have zero basis in facts.

HashiCorp has made claims of copyright infringement in a cease & desist letter. These claims are completely unsubstantiated.

The code in question can be clearly shown to have been copied from older code under the MPL-2.0 license. HashiCorp seems to have copied the same code itself when they implemented their version of this feature. All of this is easily visible in our detailed SCO analysis, as well as their own comments which indicate this.

Documents

• HashiCorp's C&D Letter
• Our Response
• Source Code Origin Document: [HTML, PDF] ⇐ For the detailed code analysis, see here.

To prevent further harassment of individual people, we have redacted any personal information from these documents.

Conclusion

Despite these events, we have managed to carry out significant development on OpenTofu 1.7, including state encryption, “for_each” implementation for “import” blocks, as well as the all-new provider-defined functions supported by the recently released provider plugin protocol.

On that note, we will be releasing a new pre-release version next week, and we are eager to gather feedback from the community.

— The OpenTofu Team

The image in this blog post contains code licensed under the BUSL-1.1 by HashiCorp. However, for the purposes of this post we are making non-commercial, transformative fair use under 17 U.S. Code § 107. You can read more about fair use on the website of the US Copyright Office.

I have a massive terraform state I maintain for work. After learning about reusing resources using modules I adopted the same rule for terraform I have for other PLs "only call functions in the main func". Meaning I'm only allowed to declare modules that reference resources at the top level.

My problem is that I have modules calling modules all over the place, the average length of any of my resources is 8 names. I have values I want to share across multiple different kinds of modules that do different things. Currently I have a top level module called "constants" with output blocks to store every constant I need. It works to an extent.

The thing is that I had a similar problem when web developing in React. Prop drilling is a coding style in React where a component receives a prop just for the purpose of passing the prop to a child component, the receiving component doesn't actually need that prop for itself. React solves this by the context api which lets one component pass a value to any child component of any depth. How can we have something similar in Terraform? Even though every resource I have is defined once in code, it declares the same resources hundreds of times with different appropriate values.

I wish I could pass things like the dockerSecret to a kubernetes deployment 6 modules deep in such a way that that dependant component of a module waits for the docker secret to be created while other resources that don't depend on it can be scheduled to be created later. Prop drilling doesn't work all that well and it forces you to copy alot of code. Maybe modules aren't the best way to reuse resources.

I feel like HCL doesn't have syntax that would support such a thing idomatically. Maybe something like decorator syntax or a special type of block where you write a proper data, resource, or module block?

What do you guys think?

OpenTofu is also officially under the Linux Foundation.

You will invoke tofu instead of terraform.

For context: https://opentf.org/

If you guys want, you can set it as community icon.