These types of things are very hard to definitively prove one way or the other. I was once loudly accused of plagiarizing someone's answer on Stack Overflow. An

These types of things are very hard to definitively prove one way or the other. I was once loudly accused of plagiarizing someone's answer on Stack Overflow. And they were right, the answers were very similar – the code was near-identical and even some of the verbiage of the explanation was quite similar. Luckily I was able to prove my innocence quite conclusively as my answer was several months older that theirs. Whoops! We had a laugh about it and it all ended well, but it's a nice example on how two strangers can arrive at very similar code. Should probably look at the original commit in the PR, rather than the current state of the repo. There's quite a bit of feedback on that PR and there may have been other changes since: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/pull/1158/commits https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/pull/1158/commits It's certainly not a blind copy/paste, but I find it very hard to say if it's a reworked version of terraform or a clean re-implementation. I think both are possible, or something in-between: they looked at the terraform patch to see what approach they took, went "ah right, that approach will work", and then implemented their own patch "from scratch". Is that legal? Probably. Is it moral? Well, you decide. OpenTofu already requires a Developer Certificate of Origin: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#signing-off-your-commits https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.... – basically we have to believe people are not lying when they say they're the author. While there are perhaps some eye-brow raising bits of code here and there, I think the current evidence is not even close to strong enough to call people liars.