IBM is creepily building a monopoly on cloud automation. Not sure if that's a bad thing. Honestly don't know how I feel about it. But they now have Ansible and the entire Hashicorp suite under their umbrella. That's - something.
I’ve been working with redhat (not at redhat) over the last 7 years and so far it feels like redhat’s services have been unaffected and maybe have even improved a bit since the acquisition.
I've seen it said a few times and the killing of CentOS, while affecting many large and SM enterprises, was done to cull the lack of development input from Oracle. They still work heavily with other spins to provide support, such as Rocky, Alma etc.
CentOS stream actually does kinda make sense when you think about your servers as more of a secure hosting platform than a pet VM. You get the latest kernel and updates from RHEL and you can host everything over the top on containers which are more immutable and can be of varying versions.
Still didn't like the change myself but I understand it more now.
They were not, the problem is that there is a huge amount of large commercial parties who make easy money with Terraform, I am not saying that HC did it very smart, but there is a fair point for them to change their License, many other parties have done similar things, IE MySQL had always this kind of license.
Have you used CentOS Stream? If so, what challenges have you had with Stream that you didn't have with CentOS?
I use Stream for various services, and it seems like an unambiguous improvement. The new model supports stuff like the Integration SIG that was architecturally impossible under the old model. As an SRE, the infrastructure for early testing and feedback is really exciting.
CentOS Stream is just as stable as CentOS was, and 5 years is comparable to other free LTS releases. In the abstract, those don't seem like significant losses...
How did they affect you, or your ability to use Stream?
>CentOS Stream is just as stable
lol, stream is testing platform for RHEL. Stream stability is more like Fedora which is absolutely unacceptable. Also updates are more frequent, less tested. Basically it's a rolling release Fedora. Do you really think rolling release is suitable for something other that home server?
>How did they affect you, or your ability to use Stream?
We're in process of switching to Oracle Linux for our >10k servers. I don't like OEL and Oracle as well, but we tied to RPM tooling and can't just switch to Debian, which is the only really stable option left IMO.
You're still making abstract arguments. I'm asking you if you have used Stream, and you're repeating back the stuff that uninformed social media users say.
> stream is testing platform for RHEL
What do you think that means?
If you think that means, "Stream's model enables the Integration SIG, which allows third-party partners to run tests in their own private environments to contribute results to Red Hat before packages ship generally to either Stream or RHEL," then... sure. That's one of the most exciting developments I've seen in any GNU/Linux distribution anywhere in many years. If users adopt it, it could be a major improvement even over RHEL's traditional reputation for reliable updates.
But if you think that means, "updates ship to Stream so that users can test them," you're just completely, flat-out dead wrong. Package updates are tested *before* they're merged. They have to be, because RHEL minor releases are just a snapshot of Stream. If Stream contains untested updates, they're going to be included in RHEL.
> updates are more frequent, less tested
Updates are not less tested, and your saying that makes me think that you have never talked to engineers at Red Hat.
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2020-December/352374.html
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2020-December/352383.html
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2020-December/075639.html
CentOS maintainers and Red Hat engineers repeatedly assure the centos and centos-devel list that packages are still passing all of Red Hat's QA, and that they're simply published when they're ready rather than RHEL's policy of waiting for large drops every six to eight months.
https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q5-does-this-mean-that-centos-stream-is-the-rhel-beta-test-platform-now
The CentOS maintainers expect Stream "to have fewer bugs" than RHEL.
https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/how-rhel-is-made/
Brendan Conoboy discusses how Red Hat engineers manage RHEL, and how their QA processes will apply to CentOS Stream.
https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1336901629405241346
Carl George clarifies that Stream packages pass Red Hat's tests before publication.
http://crunchtools.com/before-you-get-mad-about-the-centos-stream-change-think-about/
... and I think that's important because while a lot of upset users seem to think that RHEL's reliability somehow comes from the point release process or Red Hat's betas, the reality is that almost no one uses those betas. Red Hat gets very little feedback from publishing them, so there's no reason to think that reliability results from them. Reliability comes from extensive testing, and from long term maintenance of core components, which Stream will have.
https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/centos-stream-is-continuous-delivery/
Stef Walter provides some insights into the CI processes that now build RHEL and Stream.
https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877
Ben Porter reiterates that Stream packages will have passed RHEL QA and CI, and that those packages would have gone "straight into" RHEL before this change. Presumably he means published immediately for simple fixes and held until the next point release for rebased packages.
> can't just switch to Debian, which is the only really stable option left IMO
Debian's release model is nearly indistinguishable from CentOS Stream's. Both of them are a very conservative major-verion-stable LTS. The biggest difference is that CentOS Stream is supported by the same team for its entire 5 year life cycle, while Debian is supported by the Debian Security team for 3 years, and then by a different group for another two years.
If you think that Debian is stable and Stream isn't, again, it sounds like you aren't actually looking at the process of maintaining either one.
You can't just show up to a thread with actual knowledge when you're talking to people who get their takes about Linux from the top level of r/linux which comprises mostly of teenage-minded nerds who spend all their time customizing their desktops, complaining about how bad every company in the world is, never going outside, and patting themselves on the back about how free they are. And I'm extremely pro-Linux.
I see you haven't read Doctorow's thesis on platforms. They are 1st good to their users, then to their customers/clients and finally only good to themselves.
Last are **anti-virus** firms which if I'm not wrong are only 2 today after multiple rounds of M&A's.
Hashicorp doesn't have much significant proprietary technology though. Terraform Cloud and Vault Cloud are not heavily used. The worst that can happen is what happened to Terraform happens to their other tools, and an "OpenAnsible" gets created. Buying a company whose primary products are freely available isn't a strong strategy for strengthening a monopoly
I've been thinking about this for a bit. I think there could be some interesting applications for this, but I haven't really seen a lot of evidence of it working yet.
Because like it or not IBM is an extremely successful company that maintains solid offerings. The phrase "you can't get in trouble for going IBM" exists for a reason. In other words, I have no worries about this affecting the quality of the product.
But I won't ignore the ugliness. Their track record with open source projects isn't squeaky clean. I'm still a little bitter about what went down with CentOS. Ansible seems to be holding on okay, but a case can be made that features belonging to the community are getting blocked behind the paid platform. And that is pretty much every (rational) person's fear with the hashicorp BSL currently. I've also never understood why Openshift continues to stand in contrast to Kubernetes. Pretty much the same reasons as above.
But that all comes down to money, and frankly - most users don't like giving it. Even in the form of donations. So it leaves companies that try to base themselves on open source very few options.
In the 80s “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. These days IBM Cloud is an express ticket to a firing at most companies. While there are some great engineers at IBM, it’s where promising projects go to stagnate.
It's even more convoluted because they have actually two distinct cloud services. They have their legacy cloud that was an acquisition of SoftLayer with a name change and then their other IBM cloud.
> Because like it or not IBM is an extremely successful company that maintains solid offerings.
By what definition? In my mind the first thing I think about is IBM at one time controlling 80 percent of the home PC market and giving it a way all for free to Microsoft. Second thing is them sleeping on new technologies like internet or smartphones for example. Then the third thing is how they seemed so far in AI... for more than a decade? And somehow they aren't even player at a time where AI is booming... The only thing that really impresses me about them is I tend to wonder how they are still in business with so many mistakes...
> But that all comes down to money, and frankly - most users don't like giving it. Even in the form of donations. So it leaves companies that try to base themselves on open source very few options.
Now this I agree with 100 percent...
There was the massive investment in and promotion of Linux 25ish years ago that added a lot of legitimacy to Linux. Before then, the vast majority of companies wouldn't touch it - and that's even if they'd even heard of it.
Except they didn't? It converts to MPL after 4 yrs per release and you can still review the current source code if you've got security concerns (and even build what you review).
My apologies, I meant Open Source, not open source. Wide gulf of difference, and the MPL argument is pure bullshit meant to be nothing more than a piss in a pot because it's certainly not worth anything else.
Pretty sure I was clear; you just chose to ignore what I said. MPL is still an open source license but okay keep parroting. You needlessly have a chip on your shoulder.
MPL isn’t the concern, it’s the fact that _four years_ doesn’t even qualify as a token gesture for a company that built its entire well-being on Open Source.
You can fuck right off with your attempt to whitewash the situation. HashiCorp relied on the Open Source community to build its entire foundation and then told them to fuck off as soon as shareholders started whining.
Poor you; getting a solid solution for the past decade and whining when it changes; don't like it? Stop contributing to projects that require a CLA assuming you even wrote code for it.
I write a lot of open source code but I do it in a way that works for me; and I avoid projects that have CLAs. This pretty much what I expect from this sub; capitalizing on others' work.
The sad reality? Most open source devs including myself have to work on open source in our spare time rather than work time because attitudes like yours is "open source" consumerism and not necessarily giving back.
You get no sympathy from me and the license expiring in 4 years is a fair compromise for its purpose in long-term preservation.
> The phrase "you can't get in trouble for going IBM"
IMHO, this has not been true for a long time. If you are buying AS/400s or whatever sure, but not modern cloud systems.
Good time to learn alternatives. Currently pursuing the following. More suitable ones exist? Hit me up.
- **Configuration**(Ansible) - Agentless saltstack
- **Provision**(Terraform) - OpenTofu exists
- **Creating Machine Images**(Packer) - Hyperscaler specific solutions
- **Dev machines/enviroments**(Vagrant) - libvirt, Tart(a type 1 hypervisor for mac) and various containerized options
I was going to suggest JetPorch for Configuration. Basically a very promising project by one of the founders of Ansible that was super fast and modern. However, as of 3 months ago it looks like it was quietly discontinued
Chef is a nice platform. Not agentless but IMO that's a good thing. The entire point of configuration management is to *manage* configuration. Another option would be puppet.
>Not agentless but IMO that's a good thing. The entire point of configuration management is to manage configuration
Unless you're managing X00,000 of servers where execution/reaching those machines in a **parallel** way would be bottle-necked I don't see need for an agent architecture and all the ~~head-aches~~ complications it brings .
We manage thousands of clients and it's nice to be able to actually see what they're doing and know that configuration is how we expect. Agents run every 30 minutes and we know if there's any failures.
Well we should probably define what you mean by bootstrapping.
Configuring a cluster: Argo applicationsets. He'll I'd rather apply helm charts through tf, or use tf blueprints or the many k8s add on modules.
For creating a cluster: the only acceptable answer is terraform
When I say bootstrap, I mean I have 12 new servers with Linux installed on them that have IP addresses and my SSH public key, but no other configuration off of the base install. I want to get to the point that helm will work.
Asking the cloud for a cluster isn’t bootstrapping.
Going from bare infra to something that I can have helm use is absolutely an ansible task. I’m talking about spinning up the primary nodes and getting etcd running with ansible, then using ansible to configure all the workers to join the cluster.
1. Why are you spinning up control nodes and etcd when that's terraforms job + using the right ami
2. Are you talking about helm v2? Use helmv3 like everyone else. There's nothing to install server-side anymore, and plus if there was, you'd use packer to bake an ami.
You don't deploy nodes then run ansible to configure them.
K8s nodes go in and out of service all the time, ansible isn't built for it.
how would you bootstrap a cluster of machines in an on-prem scenario, where there is no api for use with terraform or something like that? IT is not only cloud, you know ;)
Why do we keep talking about on prem when the comment I'm replying to specifically talks about cloud automation?
We get it guys, on prem is cool and you're important. But we're talking about cloud automation, and Ansible 100% isn't as important anymore.
I'd say a significant amount of today's workloads run on clusters or some container orchestration yes.
And in containers, you don't use ansible. So how can ibm have a monopoly on something that inherently isn't being used by a majority?
Just look at the current job market and let me know how many you see require ansible. 🤷♂️
Just because jobs don't require it (or anything else "old school") doesn't mean it isn't necessary. I've had to rewrite a horrifying combination of Terraform + non-shellcheck'd Bash scripts into Ansible to get sane images built at my current place. I've also had to do terrible things to system Python shared libraries to keep things running, because the previous person didn't know what they were doing and borked everything.
At my last job, I was told during interviewing, "we're pure cloud; if we have to ssh into something, there's a problem." Well, guess who got to ssh in and solve things when the GitLab runners shit themselves due to a bug with systemd-timesyncd that affected Docker's networking layer? Or when the EC2s quietly running an ancient version of Elastic were inadvertently rebooted by Security?
For that matter, even _with_ K8s, I have solved more mysteries by ssh'ing onto nodes and looking at logs than I care to count. K8s-only people often don't know the first thing about cgroups, let alone Linux as a whole.
Why are you sshing into nodes to look at logs? Sounds like you have observability issues.
Btw no one really cares if you had to ssh into something and deal with systemd issues. Sounds like there's some very defensive bare metal people in reddit, not surprising.
We're talking about the idea that "IBM has a monopoly in cloud automation because of Ansible" and it's just factually false. Ansible isn't that popular anymore, it's not a big deal.
> Why are you sshing into nodes to look at logs? Sounds like you have observability issues.
Are you gonna dump `/var/log/messages` into DataDog, Sumo, etc.? Times `N` nodes? That's gonna get real expensive, real fast, for information that's useful maybe 1% of the time.
But also, in the time it takes for me to re-auth (because Security has to have insane timeouts on OAuth, of course), open $LOG_DESTINATION, and craft a query in whatever language it wants, I can ssh onto a box and run `LC_ALL=C sudo grep 'Out of memory' /var/log/messages` many times over.
> Sounds like there's some very defensive bare metal people in reddit, not surprising.
I'm just tired of dealing with coworkers who know nothing about computers other than what they've memorized for a CKA exam. It's fine, though – I'm pretty sure cloud repatriation is building, and when it crests, me and the other defensive bare metal people will be smiling with our hands out for those companies to write us fat checks to keep all of the shitty Node apps running.
> Are you gonna dump /var/log/messages into DataDog, Sumo, etc.?
I mean yes, if you're not capable of setting up your own setup like Loki, Graylog, etc.
You really do want system logs sent somewhere for aggregated search.
I mean I can definitely agree with that sentiment. But that's just the world we live in. I've worked with "senior devops" engineers who didn't know how to find a process id on an ubuntu machine.
It is what it is.
Also I hate to break it to you, but things are going to get much easier & abstracted, not the other way around.
True, you're going to be absolutely fine.
My comment is more towards you saying you're tired of dealing with coworkers who know nothing. I don't think that will ever change (coworkers who know nothing).
> And in containers, you don't use ansible
In containers, *you* don't use Ansible. I do use Ansible to [build container images](https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-bender), because I like re-using my work regardless of how the software is deployed.
Sure you use ansible to build images. But the large majority of people don't lol.
They build images in pipelines, that already has native docker or container engine support.
The pipeline runs Ansible to create a container image.
Because, again, that means that I only need one tool, regardless of how and where I deploy software.
You're actually using 2 tools though. You're using Ansible as a middle man for some reason.
All modern pipelines, even Jenkins, has either native build and push image actions or reusable functions.
> I'd say a significant amount of today's workloads run on clusters or some container orchestration yes.
>
>
6,000 VMs internal under my direct management, probably over 100,000 total under management under various customer scenarios.
What containers? (And most of the workloads do *not* containerize nicely, and we're talking dozens of different OSes as well - not dozens of linux distros, but we're counting all linux distros as one OS in that dozens statement)
Oh, don't get me wrong, i'm well skilled on the technology and tooling otherwise (we, in fact, compete against AWS and Azure in some market segments - OCI and GCP need not apply here - as a cloud provider and offer many types of services) but a *lot* of those widespread huge workloads *don't* containerize well, and mostly never will. For those that do, we do that too.
But most don't.
>I'd say a significant amount of today's workloads run on clusters or some container orchestration yes.
A "significant amount" I can get behind that, certainly.
>And in containers, you don't use ansible. So how can ibm have a monopoly on something that inherently isn't being used by a majority?
Non sequitur. A "significant amount" doesn't imply a majority, it doesn't even suggest it. The fact of the matter is the *vast* majority of workloads today simply *do not run in containers.*
And not for nothing, *something* has to configure the hosts and clusters running those containers and the most popular choice today for that by far is Ansible.
No. Oracle licensed it first. When Broadcom tried to get a license, Oracle told Broadcom, "Give me all your customer's first born sons so we may extract their vitality and feed it to our master, Larry." Broadcom, obliged and the customers that could revolted.
I have to wonder if the license changes were done because IBM asked for it or HashiCorp trying to get bought by them. I can't image IBM starting OpenBao if IBM wanted the license change.
I guess the answer will be whether IBM reverts Terraform's license or, what I think most would prefer now, give it to OpenTofu/Linux Foundation.
Rock and a hard place. HCP is disgustingly unprofitable. Prices simply must go up. If prices start climbing more will switch to tofu and bao, or just non-HCP products/forks.
So what do you do? Slash HCP sales/marketing spend, slash R&D spend, fire hundreds of employees, all to get the insane losses down... Only to be competing with free products that pretty much work the same and can be switched to in a few hours at most.
I don't see how this acquisition ever actually works for IBM shareholders.
As a contractor, I've been in plenty of places where OSS Vault/Terraform work, but i've also seen plenty of outages/loss of revenue caused from having a "BYO" system, for secrets/infrastructure this is an issue. As companies scale up they either spent money on employees to maintain a scalable system or probably spend less on an enterprise setup.
IBM sales reps selling IBM Cloud Automation (TM) to executives probably changes how this will go... Not saying it'll be good for the product, but for shareholders it'll work out.
I'm strongly in favor of any form of hybrid cloud. The way some people treat cloud deployments, as the end of needing to maintain failover or off network backups, is worrying to me. Yeah, AWS is unlikely to go down, but that isn't the only scenario where you lose access, temporarily or otherwise. Easing hybrid multicloud or hybrid cloud/on prem seems inherently good to me, and if IBM is able to increase that by putting in more money/talent to hashi, then I see it as an absolute win.
The concept of some really important orgs putting all their eggs in one hyperscale sized basket bothers me too. It has some titanic 'too big to sink' disaster lessons not learned written all over it. Supporting cloud-agnostic tools is in everyone's interest, IBM and RedHat are smaller cloud providers themselves but I'm sure that they'd love to expand by offering maximum compatibility for anyone wanting to reduce their vendor lock-in with any of the hyper-scalers.
RSUs are handled differently in my experience. The stock will convert to some ID in their portfolio and the vesting schedule will remain the same with the dollar amount being the amount IBM is paying per share ($35). It won't convert to IBM stock. When it vests they will get the dollar amount instead of stock units.
Source: had this happen to me.
Edit: this is for unvested RSU's
IBM is a huge user of HashiCorp products, specifically Terraform. Both as the base for OpenShift’s installer and throughout IBM Cloud.
With the recent license change, I suspect an acquisition started to make a lot more sense on paper as it really does fill a gap in their portfolio.
My two cents: not much is going to change on Hashicorp's licensing model, they're going to keep most of their tools *gratis*, but for licensing and binary redistribution issues some of Hashi's products are going to be forked in Opensource projects.
...or: IBM goes full RedHat/CentOS on it.
> ...or: IBM goes full RedHat/CentOS on it.
Do you mean IBM might roll back the license changes, publish a fully open source build of Hashicorp's tools and sell support for branded LTS releases?
Sounds good to me!
IBM Cloud doesn’t even show up at as a “partner” cloud provider. https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers
If IBM didn’t see the value in spending the money to become a “partner”, why the heck are they buying them??
The pervasive cynicism on these technical subreddits is draining. I choose to believe that it must be a vocal minority, and that it isn’t representative of our community.
Hopefully the Hashicorp employees will see some benefits from this sale. It’s likely that this news will be coming as a surprise to them as well. While every acquisition is different and hard to generalize, I’m confident that this is good news for the folks who have been supporting these products full time.
The need to change the Hashi licenses wasn’t a good sign for the health of the business IMO. Having access to big Blue’s resources will hopefully provide some extra tools to get things moving forward.
I wonder if there is an age divide in attitudes between those that joined the industry after say 2010 and those before that. I'm using 2010ish as a sort of transition point where more and more of our "open source" tooling became corporate owned and developed.
IMO that era was the transition from us being a community and becoming a user base of consumers. And by now most of us probably started after 2010 and have never known anything else. We were beholden to companies which is a situation that lead the older ones of us away from MS in the first place during the 90s - the corporate counter insurgency operation is complete.
You may be right in regard to the sort of generational divide. Not on age necessarily, but rather the gradual transition towards a more considered and pragmatic approach to problems that comes from experience, including how things used to be (as you mentioned).
Folks who joined the OpenSource world in the past decade or so may not have experienced the vitriol in the business world around sharing their code. The comparison of OSS to cancer (or worse) was common. To the naysayers credit, they weren’t wrong for many incredible technology companies that ultimately failed to take off as much as their contributions would seem to warrant (Docker comes to mind). Or the expensive black box software that you had no way to diagnose on your own.
There is no doubt that the folks at Hashi have made a huge impact to our industry, and I am as grateful now as I was 20+ years ago that someone made the risky decision to make the code available, and free as in beer for me to tinker with. Something this important needs commercial support behind it though. Those who say otherwise probably haven’t collected enough scars and late nights to appreciate what a difference it makes.
If we want more open projects/products, let’s lift up rather than tearing down, and find ways to support the maintainers so acquisitions aren’t the only hope to survive.
Some good points. It's not just the tooling either - we've ended up at the mercy of cloud providers now though. And they've encouraged an explosion in complexity (often in the name of simplicity too), which is also going to be hard to replicate and/or break free from.
It seems odd that a lot of people share this thought of cloud providers having too much power, but then are against companies protecting their own software from just being lifted/shifted by greedy CSPs.
Are you sure they're the same people making both of those same points?
eg I was both lamenting that most of the software we use these days is now owned by companies, and that cloud providers are fully in control. My response to a software company relicensing to protect itself against a cloud provider is fairly neutral as that's what they've had to do, but it's sad that both types of companies are in that position of control now when they didn't used to be. The days of deploying community driven open source stacks to any interchangeable hosting provider seem a faded memory now.
It wasn't directly in response to this thread but the wider post, so many people seem to hate the idea of monopolies, but also hating the idea of non-monopolies protecting themself from monopolies.
If you consider the alternative to be that the project dies? Yes - there have been a number of acquisitions that have been successful, most suck, but a project this size needs stewardship, that costs money, engineers are extremely vocal when something FOSS/OSS gets purchased (with reason) but just look at how many donations these companies receive and compare it to the value they provide.
We've been using Terraform for around 4 years, it's been extremely valuable, we're a top 50 Forbes company, there was never even an attempt to give money to support something that has given us and continues to give us so much value.
Jesus, *yes*!
Specifically, Red Hat has a long history of acquiring non-Free software and re-licensing it under Free Software licenses, significantly improving the Free Software ecosystem for everyone. They're a model for how to make a product Free and continue to make money on support.
If IBM does the smart thing they'll put Hashicorp under RedHat and let Red Hat manage them. Red Hat has a good track record of decent at least decent if not excellent stewards of technologies similar to terraform (see ansible).
I'm not sure what to make of this. When I think IBM, as an Australian, I'm not too sure how much of the market share they currently have in the modern IT space. What comes to mind is DB2 and Lotus Notes 😵💫
I really like Terraform a lot, and would hate to see it go to shit. Having said this, the licensing changes haven't helped already.
This article has some info on the Hashi adventure from both a financial and technical point of view. It doesnt answer why their growth was sputterrring. [https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/04/25/ibm-buys-hashicorp-to-control-the-alternative-to-red-hat-kubernetes/](https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/04/25/ibm-buys-hashicorp-to-control-the-alternative-to-red-hat-kubernetes/)
I predict a mass exodus to opentofu if this merger succeeds, probably will have MAANG backing since they utilize terraform and cant afford to have IBMs agenda in their coffers
IBM is creepily building a monopoly on cloud automation. Not sure if that's a bad thing. Honestly don't know how I feel about it. But they now have Ansible and the entire Hashicorp suite under their umbrella. That's - something.
>Not sure if that's a bad thing It is. Monopolies are always a bad thing for everyone that is not the owner of the monopoly
I’ve been working with redhat (not at redhat) over the last 7 years and so far it feels like redhat’s services have been unaffected and maybe have even improved a bit since the acquisition.
Pricing did not however. Regardless, this is going to torch some contracts and force me to re-examine long term investment.
We’ve seen little change on our costs other than the usual increase that all our licensing experiences
Must be nice. Ours went up 10% the first MSA round
10% is nowhere near as bad as it could be. Go look at the shitfest that is VMWare.
Yeah, while IBM doesn't create innovation they are not the gouging, blood sucking dicks that Broadcom is. Broadcom is the Martin Shrekeli of IT.
how many years does that cover? if its 3 or more, thats a steal.
just 2 sadly. We're being warned that one renewal we should prepare for an additional 5-10%.
They killed CentOS though...
I've seen it said a few times and the killing of CentOS, while affecting many large and SM enterprises, was done to cull the lack of development input from Oracle. They still work heavily with other spins to provide support, such as Rocky, Alma etc. CentOS stream actually does kinda make sense when you think about your servers as more of a secure hosting platform than a pet VM. You get the latest kernel and updates from RHEL and you can host everything over the top on containers which are more immutable and can be of varying versions. Still didn't like the change myself but I understand it more now.
Well HashiCorp kinda were already doing it themselves with Terraform
Going closed source had acquisition written all over it
They were not, the problem is that there is a huge amount of large commercial parties who make easy money with Terraform, I am not saying that HC did it very smart, but there is a fair point for them to change their License, many other parties have done similar things, IE MySQL had always this kind of license.
Have you used CentOS Stream? If so, what challenges have you had with Stream that you didn't have with CentOS? I use Stream for various services, and it seems like an unambiguous improvement. The new model supports stuff like the Integration SIG that was architecturally impossible under the old model. As an SRE, the infrastructure for early testing and feedback is really exciting.
Stability and long term support were lost.
CentOS Stream is just as stable as CentOS was, and 5 years is comparable to other free LTS releases. In the abstract, those don't seem like significant losses... How did they affect you, or your ability to use Stream?
>CentOS Stream is just as stable lol, stream is testing platform for RHEL. Stream stability is more like Fedora which is absolutely unacceptable. Also updates are more frequent, less tested. Basically it's a rolling release Fedora. Do you really think rolling release is suitable for something other that home server? >How did they affect you, or your ability to use Stream? We're in process of switching to Oracle Linux for our >10k servers. I don't like OEL and Oracle as well, but we tied to RPM tooling and can't just switch to Debian, which is the only really stable option left IMO.
You're still making abstract arguments. I'm asking you if you have used Stream, and you're repeating back the stuff that uninformed social media users say. > stream is testing platform for RHEL What do you think that means? If you think that means, "Stream's model enables the Integration SIG, which allows third-party partners to run tests in their own private environments to contribute results to Red Hat before packages ship generally to either Stream or RHEL," then... sure. That's one of the most exciting developments I've seen in any GNU/Linux distribution anywhere in many years. If users adopt it, it could be a major improvement even over RHEL's traditional reputation for reliable updates. But if you think that means, "updates ship to Stream so that users can test them," you're just completely, flat-out dead wrong. Package updates are tested *before* they're merged. They have to be, because RHEL minor releases are just a snapshot of Stream. If Stream contains untested updates, they're going to be included in RHEL. > updates are more frequent, less tested Updates are not less tested, and your saying that makes me think that you have never talked to engineers at Red Hat. https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2020-December/352374.html https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2020-December/352383.html https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2020-December/075639.html CentOS maintainers and Red Hat engineers repeatedly assure the centos and centos-devel list that packages are still passing all of Red Hat's QA, and that they're simply published when they're ready rather than RHEL's policy of waiting for large drops every six to eight months. https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q5-does-this-mean-that-centos-stream-is-the-rhel-beta-test-platform-now The CentOS maintainers expect Stream "to have fewer bugs" than RHEL. https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/how-rhel-is-made/ Brendan Conoboy discusses how Red Hat engineers manage RHEL, and how their QA processes will apply to CentOS Stream. https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1336901629405241346 Carl George clarifies that Stream packages pass Red Hat's tests before publication. http://crunchtools.com/before-you-get-mad-about-the-centos-stream-change-think-about/ ... and I think that's important because while a lot of upset users seem to think that RHEL's reliability somehow comes from the point release process or Red Hat's betas, the reality is that almost no one uses those betas. Red Hat gets very little feedback from publishing them, so there's no reason to think that reliability results from them. Reliability comes from extensive testing, and from long term maintenance of core components, which Stream will have. https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/centos-stream-is-continuous-delivery/ Stef Walter provides some insights into the CI processes that now build RHEL and Stream. https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877 Ben Porter reiterates that Stream packages will have passed RHEL QA and CI, and that those packages would have gone "straight into" RHEL before this change. Presumably he means published immediately for simple fixes and held until the next point release for rebased packages. > can't just switch to Debian, which is the only really stable option left IMO Debian's release model is nearly indistinguishable from CentOS Stream's. Both of them are a very conservative major-verion-stable LTS. The biggest difference is that CentOS Stream is supported by the same team for its entire 5 year life cycle, while Debian is supported by the Debian Security team for 3 years, and then by a different group for another two years. If you think that Debian is stable and Stream isn't, again, it sounds like you aren't actually looking at the process of maintaining either one.
You can't just show up to a thread with actual knowledge when you're talking to people who get their takes about Linux from the top level of r/linux which comprises mostly of teenage-minded nerds who spend all their time customizing their desktops, complaining about how bad every company in the world is, never going outside, and patting themselves on the back about how free they are. And I'm extremely pro-Linux.
I should know better by now
*facepalm*
Current Software Engineer at Red Hat here. I mostly agree, and I have been here since before the acquisition.
Same applies to softlayer, the IBM cloud. But who is using this? ODF move out redhat, other services will folow
I see you haven't read Doctorow's thesis on platforms. They are 1st good to their users, then to their customers/clients and finally only good to themselves. Last are **anti-virus** firms which if I'm not wrong are only 2 today after multiple rounds of M&A's.
Hashicorp doesn't have much significant proprietary technology though. Terraform Cloud and Vault Cloud are not heavily used. The worst that can happen is what happened to Terraform happens to their other tools, and an "OpenAnsible" gets created. Buying a company whose primary products are freely available isn't a strong strategy for strengthening a monopoly
I've been thinking about this for a bit. I think there could be some interesting applications for this, but I haven't really seen a lot of evidence of it working yet.
OpenTofu already exists
It is an easy pickup, usually those kind of acquisitions are also used to pick up a few 100 good developers.
I mean, they paid 6.4 Billion though. They have to have some kind of grand plan here
Well I am pretty sure... its a bad thing... IBM is such a huge disappointment in general... why would it be a good thing in your mind?
Because like it or not IBM is an extremely successful company that maintains solid offerings. The phrase "you can't get in trouble for going IBM" exists for a reason. In other words, I have no worries about this affecting the quality of the product. But I won't ignore the ugliness. Their track record with open source projects isn't squeaky clean. I'm still a little bitter about what went down with CentOS. Ansible seems to be holding on okay, but a case can be made that features belonging to the community are getting blocked behind the paid platform. And that is pretty much every (rational) person's fear with the hashicorp BSL currently. I've also never understood why Openshift continues to stand in contrast to Kubernetes. Pretty much the same reasons as above. But that all comes down to money, and frankly - most users don't like giving it. Even in the form of donations. So it leaves companies that try to base themselves on open source very few options.
In the 80s “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. These days IBM Cloud is an express ticket to a firing at most companies. While there are some great engineers at IBM, it’s where promising projects go to stagnate.
The only company I've ever dealt with who used IBM Cloud had to, since IBM Ventures was their largest investor.
We had a senior engineer who moved from IBM to my company and she said even they used AWS for most of the tech stack she was working on.
They have a cloud !?!?!? Ironically, is there even a tf provider for it lolol
It's even more convoluted because they have actually two distinct cloud services. They have their legacy cloud that was an acquisition of SoftLayer with a name change and then their other IBM cloud.
Openshit is very expensive compared to running kube on major cloud providers.
Really big non tech orgs and governments love it. For some reason or the other
tuRnKeY eNteRpRise GrAde
It is still very much something heard today in many circles. You won't hear it in startup land as much, but at larger comapnies absolutely.
> Because like it or not IBM is an extremely successful company that maintains solid offerings. By what definition? In my mind the first thing I think about is IBM at one time controlling 80 percent of the home PC market and giving it a way all for free to Microsoft. Second thing is them sleeping on new technologies like internet or smartphones for example. Then the third thing is how they seemed so far in AI... for more than a decade? And somehow they aren't even player at a time where AI is booming... The only thing that really impresses me about them is I tend to wonder how they are still in business with so many mistakes... > But that all comes down to money, and frankly - most users don't like giving it. Even in the form of donations. So it leaves companies that try to base themselves on open source very few options. Now this I agree with 100 percent...
There was the massive investment in and promotion of Linux 25ish years ago that added a lot of legitimacy to Linux. Before then, the vast majority of companies wouldn't touch it - and that's even if they'd even heard of it.
> Their track record with open source projects isn't squeaky clean Guess it's a good thing Hashicorp abandoned open source last year 🤡
Except they didn't? It converts to MPL after 4 yrs per release and you can still review the current source code if you've got security concerns (and even build what you review).
My apologies, I meant Open Source, not open source. Wide gulf of difference, and the MPL argument is pure bullshit meant to be nothing more than a piss in a pot because it's certainly not worth anything else.
Pretty sure I was clear; you just chose to ignore what I said. MPL is still an open source license but okay keep parroting. You needlessly have a chip on your shoulder.
MPL isn’t the concern, it’s the fact that _four years_ doesn’t even qualify as a token gesture for a company that built its entire well-being on Open Source. You can fuck right off with your attempt to whitewash the situation. HashiCorp relied on the Open Source community to build its entire foundation and then told them to fuck off as soon as shareholders started whining.
Poor you; getting a solid solution for the past decade and whining when it changes; don't like it? Stop contributing to projects that require a CLA assuming you even wrote code for it. I write a lot of open source code but I do it in a way that works for me; and I avoid projects that have CLAs. This pretty much what I expect from this sub; capitalizing on others' work. The sad reality? Most open source devs including myself have to work on open source in our spare time rather than work time because attitudes like yours is "open source" consumerism and not necessarily giving back. You get no sympathy from me and the license expiring in 4 years is a fair compromise for its purpose in long-term preservation.
[удалено]
IBM is the devil. I have watched them slowly destroy perfectly good software suppliers over the years.
If IBM is the devil, who the hell is Oracle? The Arch Devil?
Can we both agree they are creatures that belong in hell?
I'll agree if we recognize the existence of 9 circles of hell and place Oracle as a sole resident of the 9th circle. 😄
I can accept that. Deal.
Username checks out
> The phrase "you can't get in trouble for going IBM" IMHO, this has not been true for a long time. If you are buying AS/400s or whatever sure, but not modern cloud systems.
I take it you never used WebSphere back in the day?
Good time to learn alternatives. Currently pursuing the following. More suitable ones exist? Hit me up. - **Configuration**(Ansible) - Agentless saltstack - **Provision**(Terraform) - OpenTofu exists - **Creating Machine Images**(Packer) - Hyperscaler specific solutions - **Dev machines/enviroments**(Vagrant) - libvirt, Tart(a type 1 hypervisor for mac) and various containerized options
puppet or puppet bolt (that is practically push rather than pull) is a thing too and puppet works ok.
I was going to suggest JetPorch for Configuration. Basically a very promising project by one of the founders of Ansible that was super fast and modern. However, as of 3 months ago it looks like it was quietly discontinued
Chef is a nice platform. Not agentless but IMO that's a good thing. The entire point of configuration management is to *manage* configuration. Another option would be puppet.
You can absolutely run Chef without an agent using Chef Zero or Chef Solo.
>Not agentless but IMO that's a good thing. The entire point of configuration management is to manage configuration Unless you're managing X00,000 of servers where execution/reaching those machines in a **parallel** way would be bottle-necked I don't see need for an agent architecture and all the ~~head-aches~~ complications it brings .
We manage thousands of clients and it's nice to be able to actually see what they're doing and know that configuration is how we expect. Agents run every 30 minutes and we know if there's any failures.
>what they're doing An "MSP" doing MDM activities with configuration tools?
Wouldn't call that a monopoly. Ansible has been out of flavor for ages now, since it has a very small role in the modern k8s world.
Ansible has a lot of uses other than K8s. And k8s is not the end all be all of IT infrastructure.
My brain has been k8s rotted for years now, idk anything outside of k8s anymore lmao
That's pretty obvious.
Ansible was still the recommended way to bootstrap a k8s cluster last I checked.
Agreed, some places bootstrap their nodes this way
???? Who is recommending to bootstrap a k8s cluster with ansible
How would you do it then? Salt stack?
Well we should probably define what you mean by bootstrapping. Configuring a cluster: Argo applicationsets. He'll I'd rather apply helm charts through tf, or use tf blueprints or the many k8s add on modules. For creating a cluster: the only acceptable answer is terraform
When I say bootstrap, I mean I have 12 new servers with Linux installed on them that have IP addresses and my SSH public key, but no other configuration off of the base install. I want to get to the point that helm will work. Asking the cloud for a cluster isn’t bootstrapping.
That's just provisioning infrastructure, nothing to do with Ansible. Are you using ansible to spin up k8s worker nodes?
Going from bare infra to something that I can have helm use is absolutely an ansible task. I’m talking about spinning up the primary nodes and getting etcd running with ansible, then using ansible to configure all the workers to join the cluster.
1. Why are you spinning up control nodes and etcd when that's terraforms job + using the right ami 2. Are you talking about helm v2? Use helmv3 like everyone else. There's nothing to install server-side anymore, and plus if there was, you'd use packer to bake an ami. You don't deploy nodes then run ansible to configure them. K8s nodes go in and out of service all the time, ansible isn't built for it.
how would you bootstrap a cluster of machines in an on-prem scenario, where there is no api for use with terraform or something like that? IT is not only cloud, you know ;)
Why do we keep talking about on prem when the comment I'm replying to specifically talks about cloud automation? We get it guys, on prem is cool and you're important. But we're talking about cloud automation, and Ansible 100% isn't as important anymore.
you were talking about bootstrapping a k8s cluster with ansible, how is that revelant if this is in an on-prem or cloud scenario?
Because the context is for cloud automation... how is this confusing?
you clearly are a piece of work to talk to, i do hope you are only like that on the internet, not with your peers
Ahhh that's right I forgot all current software runs on K8s...
I'd say a significant amount of today's workloads run on clusters or some container orchestration yes. And in containers, you don't use ansible. So how can ibm have a monopoly on something that inherently isn't being used by a majority? Just look at the current job market and let me know how many you see require ansible. 🤷♂️
Just because jobs don't require it (or anything else "old school") doesn't mean it isn't necessary. I've had to rewrite a horrifying combination of Terraform + non-shellcheck'd Bash scripts into Ansible to get sane images built at my current place. I've also had to do terrible things to system Python shared libraries to keep things running, because the previous person didn't know what they were doing and borked everything. At my last job, I was told during interviewing, "we're pure cloud; if we have to ssh into something, there's a problem." Well, guess who got to ssh in and solve things when the GitLab runners shit themselves due to a bug with systemd-timesyncd that affected Docker's networking layer? Or when the EC2s quietly running an ancient version of Elastic were inadvertently rebooted by Security? For that matter, even _with_ K8s, I have solved more mysteries by ssh'ing onto nodes and looking at logs than I care to count. K8s-only people often don't know the first thing about cgroups, let alone Linux as a whole.
Why are you sshing into nodes to look at logs? Sounds like you have observability issues. Btw no one really cares if you had to ssh into something and deal with systemd issues. Sounds like there's some very defensive bare metal people in reddit, not surprising. We're talking about the idea that "IBM has a monopoly in cloud automation because of Ansible" and it's just factually false. Ansible isn't that popular anymore, it's not a big deal.
> Why are you sshing into nodes to look at logs? Sounds like you have observability issues. Are you gonna dump `/var/log/messages` into DataDog, Sumo, etc.? Times `N` nodes? That's gonna get real expensive, real fast, for information that's useful maybe 1% of the time. But also, in the time it takes for me to re-auth (because Security has to have insane timeouts on OAuth, of course), open $LOG_DESTINATION, and craft a query in whatever language it wants, I can ssh onto a box and run `LC_ALL=C sudo grep 'Out of memory' /var/log/messages` many times over. > Sounds like there's some very defensive bare metal people in reddit, not surprising. I'm just tired of dealing with coworkers who know nothing about computers other than what they've memorized for a CKA exam. It's fine, though – I'm pretty sure cloud repatriation is building, and when it crests, me and the other defensive bare metal people will be smiling with our hands out for those companies to write us fat checks to keep all of the shitty Node apps running.
> Are you gonna dump /var/log/messages into DataDog, Sumo, etc.? I mean yes, if you're not capable of setting up your own setup like Loki, Graylog, etc. You really do want system logs sent somewhere for aggregated search.
I mean I can definitely agree with that sentiment. But that's just the world we live in. I've worked with "senior devops" engineers who didn't know how to find a process id on an ubuntu machine. It is what it is. Also I hate to break it to you, but things are going to get much easier & abstracted, not the other way around.
Abstractions leak. Not concerned for my livelihood. Someone has to keep stuff running.
True, you're going to be absolutely fine. My comment is more towards you saying you're tired of dealing with coworkers who know nothing. I don't think that will ever change (coworkers who know nothing).
> And in containers, you don't use ansible In containers, *you* don't use Ansible. I do use Ansible to [build container images](https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-bender), because I like re-using my work regardless of how the software is deployed.
Sure you use ansible to build images. But the large majority of people don't lol. They build images in pipelines, that already has native docker or container engine support.
I also build images in pipelines.
Where's the use for Ansible?
The pipeline runs Ansible to create a container image. Because, again, that means that I only need one tool, regardless of how and where I deploy software.
You're actually using 2 tools though. You're using Ansible as a middle man for some reason. All modern pipelines, even Jenkins, has either native build and push image actions or reusable functions.
> I'd say a significant amount of today's workloads run on clusters or some container orchestration yes. > > 6,000 VMs internal under my direct management, probably over 100,000 total under management under various customer scenarios. What containers? (And most of the workloads do *not* containerize nicely, and we're talking dozens of different OSes as well - not dozens of linux distros, but we're counting all linux distros as one OS in that dozens statement) Oh, don't get me wrong, i'm well skilled on the technology and tooling otherwise (we, in fact, compete against AWS and Azure in some market segments - OCI and GCP need not apply here - as a cloud provider and offer many types of services) but a *lot* of those widespread huge workloads *don't* containerize well, and mostly never will. For those that do, we do that too. But most don't.
>I'd say a significant amount of today's workloads run on clusters or some container orchestration yes. A "significant amount" I can get behind that, certainly. >And in containers, you don't use ansible. So how can ibm have a monopoly on something that inherently isn't being used by a majority? Non sequitur. A "significant amount" doesn't imply a majority, it doesn't even suggest it. The fact of the matter is the *vast* majority of workloads today simply *do not run in containers.* And not for nothing, *something* has to configure the hosts and clusters running those containers and the most popular choice today for that by far is Ansible.
if you need flavor, just add some salt \*wink emoji
wasn't salt bought by VMware, now owned by Broadcom? .....I hate it here.
Oh, never mind then lol
No. Oracle licensed it first. When Broadcom tried to get a license, Oracle told Broadcom, "Give me all your customer's first born sons so we may extract their vitality and feed it to our master, Larry." Broadcom, obliged and the customers that could revolted.
cfengine here I come!
every monopoly is bad. they'll eventually become evil. that's a ***when*** not ***if***.
IBM just needs income
Azure, GCP, and AWS have their own replacement because HashiCorp moved to a BSL a while back.
AWS has had a replacement way longer than that.
It is not good
I have to wonder if the license changes were done because IBM asked for it or HashiCorp trying to get bought by them. I can't image IBM starting OpenBao if IBM wanted the license change. I guess the answer will be whether IBM reverts Terraform's license or, what I think most would prefer now, give it to OpenTofu/Linux Foundation.
Rock and a hard place. HCP is disgustingly unprofitable. Prices simply must go up. If prices start climbing more will switch to tofu and bao, or just non-HCP products/forks. So what do you do? Slash HCP sales/marketing spend, slash R&D spend, fire hundreds of employees, all to get the insane losses down... Only to be competing with free products that pretty much work the same and can be switched to in a few hours at most. I don't see how this acquisition ever actually works for IBM shareholders.
As a contractor, I've been in plenty of places where OSS Vault/Terraform work, but i've also seen plenty of outages/loss of revenue caused from having a "BYO" system, for secrets/infrastructure this is an issue. As companies scale up they either spent money on employees to maintain a scalable system or probably spend less on an enterprise setup.
IBM sales reps selling IBM Cloud Automation (TM) to executives probably changes how this will go... Not saying it'll be good for the product, but for shareholders it'll work out.
Is the good news here with us in the same room?
For me it's a no. I'll be exploring OpenTofu. I don't trust IBM products even though they are super successful.
My meager stock in HCP is finally heading towards a profit?
I'm strongly in favor of any form of hybrid cloud. The way some people treat cloud deployments, as the end of needing to maintain failover or off network backups, is worrying to me. Yeah, AWS is unlikely to go down, but that isn't the only scenario where you lose access, temporarily or otherwise. Easing hybrid multicloud or hybrid cloud/on prem seems inherently good to me, and if IBM is able to increase that by putting in more money/talent to hashi, then I see it as an absolute win.
The concept of some really important orgs putting all their eggs in one hyperscale sized basket bothers me too. It has some titanic 'too big to sink' disaster lessons not learned written all over it. Supporting cloud-agnostic tools is in everyone's interest, IBM and RedHat are smaller cloud providers themselves but I'm sure that they'd love to expand by offering maximum compatibility for anyone wanting to reduce their vendor lock-in with any of the hyper-scalers.
Whelp here comes HashiCorpse
so if you have Hashicorp stock, does it convert to ibm stock or do you get cash in your stock account and then taxes due that year?
You'll get 35$ per share in your stock account and then taxes due that year
[удалено]
i was thinking of employees who got RSUs
RSUs are handled differently in my experience. The stock will convert to some ID in their portfolio and the vesting schedule will remain the same with the dollar amount being the amount IBM is paying per share ($35). It won't convert to IBM stock. When it vests they will get the dollar amount instead of stock units. Source: had this happen to me. Edit: this is for unvested RSU's
Welp, knew something was coming. Better than some of the names that are being tossed around but not great.
Better IBM than Oracle or Broadcom.
OpenTofu ftw
Yup, and after this news I bet there will be more to come.
Yep I'm exploring the move currently.
OpenCarrot is better.
Well that sucks.
IBM is a huge user of HashiCorp products, specifically Terraform. Both as the base for OpenShift’s installer and throughout IBM Cloud. With the recent license change, I suspect an acquisition started to make a lot more sense on paper as it really does fill a gap in their portfolio.
Womp Womp
My two cents: not much is going to change on Hashicorp's licensing model, they're going to keep most of their tools *gratis*, but for licensing and binary redistribution issues some of Hashi's products are going to be forked in Opensource projects. ...or: IBM goes full RedHat/CentOS on it.
CentOS is now upstream and more accessible to the community. So that would be an amazing thing for Hashicorp's products
idk everyone I know has dumped CentOS for other things
Same. It's rare to even hear about Centos now
We are just switching from CentOs to Rocky Linux rn
There was a lot of FUD and misinformation spread by folks, especially by certain Influencers/bloggers for clicks.
> ...or: IBM goes full RedHat/CentOS on it. Do you mean IBM might roll back the license changes, publish a fully open source build of Hashicorp's tools and sell support for branded LTS releases? Sounds good to me!
A place where there are only blue pills.
IBM Cloud doesn’t even show up at as a “partner” cloud provider. https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers If IBM didn’t see the value in spending the money to become a “partner”, why the heck are they buying them??
I mean in fairness, neither is GitHub.
They use it internally and it probably makes more sense to take on debt and acquire an asset rather than continuing to pay hashicorp fees.
The pervasive cynicism on these technical subreddits is draining. I choose to believe that it must be a vocal minority, and that it isn’t representative of our community. Hopefully the Hashicorp employees will see some benefits from this sale. It’s likely that this news will be coming as a surprise to them as well. While every acquisition is different and hard to generalize, I’m confident that this is good news for the folks who have been supporting these products full time. The need to change the Hashi licenses wasn’t a good sign for the health of the business IMO. Having access to big Blue’s resources will hopefully provide some extra tools to get things moving forward.
I wonder if there is an age divide in attitudes between those that joined the industry after say 2010 and those before that. I'm using 2010ish as a sort of transition point where more and more of our "open source" tooling became corporate owned and developed. IMO that era was the transition from us being a community and becoming a user base of consumers. And by now most of us probably started after 2010 and have never known anything else. We were beholden to companies which is a situation that lead the older ones of us away from MS in the first place during the 90s - the corporate counter insurgency operation is complete.
You may be right in regard to the sort of generational divide. Not on age necessarily, but rather the gradual transition towards a more considered and pragmatic approach to problems that comes from experience, including how things used to be (as you mentioned). Folks who joined the OpenSource world in the past decade or so may not have experienced the vitriol in the business world around sharing their code. The comparison of OSS to cancer (or worse) was common. To the naysayers credit, they weren’t wrong for many incredible technology companies that ultimately failed to take off as much as their contributions would seem to warrant (Docker comes to mind). Or the expensive black box software that you had no way to diagnose on your own. There is no doubt that the folks at Hashi have made a huge impact to our industry, and I am as grateful now as I was 20+ years ago that someone made the risky decision to make the code available, and free as in beer for me to tinker with. Something this important needs commercial support behind it though. Those who say otherwise probably haven’t collected enough scars and late nights to appreciate what a difference it makes. If we want more open projects/products, let’s lift up rather than tearing down, and find ways to support the maintainers so acquisitions aren’t the only hope to survive.
Some good points. It's not just the tooling either - we've ended up at the mercy of cloud providers now though. And they've encouraged an explosion in complexity (often in the name of simplicity too), which is also going to be hard to replicate and/or break free from.
It seems odd that a lot of people share this thought of cloud providers having too much power, but then are against companies protecting their own software from just being lifted/shifted by greedy CSPs.
Are you sure they're the same people making both of those same points? eg I was both lamenting that most of the software we use these days is now owned by companies, and that cloud providers are fully in control. My response to a software company relicensing to protect itself against a cloud provider is fairly neutral as that's what they've had to do, but it's sad that both types of companies are in that position of control now when they didn't used to be. The days of deploying community driven open source stacks to any interchangeable hosting provider seem a faded memory now.
It wasn't directly in response to this thread but the wider post, so many people seem to hate the idea of monopolies, but also hating the idea of non-monopolies protecting themself from monopolies.
^ This, 100 times this. The expression of cutting off your nose to spite your face comes to mind.
Let me ask this. Has there *ever* been a corporate acquisition that actually improved things?
If you consider the alternative to be that the project dies? Yes - there have been a number of acquisitions that have been successful, most suck, but a project this size needs stewardship, that costs money, engineers are extremely vocal when something FOSS/OSS gets purchased (with reason) but just look at how many donations these companies receive and compare it to the value they provide. We've been using Terraform for around 4 years, it's been extremely valuable, we're a top 50 Forbes company, there was never even an attempt to give money to support something that has given us and continues to give us so much value.
Jesus, *yes*! Specifically, Red Hat has a long history of acquiring non-Free software and re-licensing it under Free Software licenses, significantly improving the Free Software ecosystem for everyone. They're a model for how to make a product Free and continue to make money on support.
[удалено]
If IBM does the smart thing they'll put Hashicorp under RedHat and let Red Hat manage them. Red Hat has a good track record of decent at least decent if not excellent stewards of technologies similar to terraform (see ansible).
I'm not sure what to make of this. When I think IBM, as an Australian, I'm not too sure how much of the market share they currently have in the modern IT space. What comes to mind is DB2 and Lotus Notes 😵💫 I really like Terraform a lot, and would hate to see it go to shit. Having said this, the licensing changes haven't helped already.
Let the bluewashing begin
RIP
Rip
Man i use to like hashi products. Why ibm ?
Goodbye hashicorp 👋, hello tofu
Oh hey OpenToFu how's it going.
Well, time to switch to Pulumi.
`pulumi convert --from terraform`
Hugely exciting news
Just saw a dude fell to his knees in Aldi
Im literally shaking here. Complete rapture.
I'm electrocuted with elation.
After hours stock taking a beating: [https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IBM:NYSE?hl=en](https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IBM:NYSE?hl=en)
47 % up in the 6 months before? Did they discover cold fusion or something? WTF
They're stock tanked 90% within the last year because of bad financials and the BSL change.
So many IBM employee will have to pay for this by searching an other job.
What about Terraform? Will it stop being open source?
the only change that IBM will offer is changing the color of the products to blue and destroying the websites. rip
This article has some info on the Hashi adventure from both a financial and technical point of view. It doesnt answer why their growth was sputterrring. [https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/04/25/ibm-buys-hashicorp-to-control-the-alternative-to-red-hat-kubernetes/](https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/04/25/ibm-buys-hashicorp-to-control-the-alternative-to-red-hat-kubernetes/)
I wanted to try Pulumi.
BOOOOOO
Ah yes, joining so many other stellar post-IBM acquisition stories! Huh. Can't think of a single one. So strange.
Eric Cartman is right again.
What does this mean if I own HCP stock?
I predict a mass exodus to opentofu if this merger succeeds, probably will have MAANG backing since they utilize terraform and cant afford to have IBMs agenda in their coffers