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Hardly surprising that IBM is doing this as they've been commercializing Vault for some time [0]. [0] - https://www.ibm.com/products/secrets-manager https://ww

Hardly surprising that IBM is doing this as they've been commercializing Vault for some time [0]. [0] - https://www.ibm.com/products/secrets-manager https://www.ibm.com/products/secrets-manager Disclosure - I work for HashiCorp and IBM has been mentioned by name in relation to the license change.

yellow_lead 3y ago
Care to comment anymore on this? I'm curious what the sentiment is within hashicorp
- throwaway129472 3y ago
  There's no overall consensus within engineering about the change itself. What is amusing is that most of the public response has been aimed at Terraform whilst internally Terraform wasn't the concern. Gruntworks and the others were not mentioned internally. It was Vault. It was IBM.
  - jsiepkes 3y ago
    Interesting. I'm curious, was it fear of IBM or was there a concrete threat from IBM which was already eating Hashicorp's lunch and was an existential threat? I have a hard time imagining why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering unless they would already be up until their necks into IBM stuff. I also wouldn't really expect the IBM and Hashicorp customer base to overlap much?
    - natbennett 3y ago
      “Application Modernization” is a huge deal in enterprise. In practice this means some combination of “make it slightly easier to get production traffic to new Java apps” and “deploy a lot of Kubernetes clusters.” Really they want the former but the k8s became a proxy for the capability. It’s why IBM bought RedHat. Hashicorp products are a very big part of this world. I’d expect that basically every IBM customer also uses Hashicorp products, but they may or may not have a commercial relationship with Hashicorp.
    - stanac 3y ago
      > why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering Because everyone know IBM and mostly only devs know about Hashicorp. There is that saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      IBM has lots of old enterprise mindshare. Existing relationships are the value. Selling Vault just becomes another line item in your IBM contract. Very similar how AWS just repackages open source products and sells them themselves (Elastic). If you don’t protect yourself from these entrenched enterprise marketing machines, you’re dead. (Brought Vault into an old, stodgy org, was a schlep)
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
        There’s even a whole cottage business around getting your app on the AWS marketplace and handling billing through AWS. Once it’s on the marketplace it becomes much more appealing to a set of B2B customers because it’s way easier internally to just add some $X,000 line item to your AWS ‘cloud’ bill than to go though the lengthy procurement and approval process of onboarding a new vendor
  - cipherboy 3y ago
    I don't think this is a valid take. Some, like myself, have left over this issue. Many discussions happened in private for various obvious reasons. But your reasoning at the end was not my understanding. That said, I have nothing but respect for my former colleagues there. Some of the best engineers have I worked with are still at Hashicorp. :-) Disclaimer: Views my own, not that of any past, present, or future employer.
- brabel 3y ago
  How would you feel if your products were forked by a big business that had already been commercializing your open source code (legally, admittedly) while making no contributions back?
  - ahtihn 3y ago
    Don't release your products under permissive open source licenses if you're not happy when that happens.
    - starttoaster 3y ago
      That’s smart today. But it was always my perception that up until a couple of years ago, when all this ElasticSearch v AWS drama began, that it was historically part of some kind of social contract in open source tooling to use permissive licenses. This was just my perception of consumers of open sourced tooling, so your mileage may vary. Very recently it seems there’s been a surge of people noting acceptance of less permissive licenses, and in this landscape I think it’s more likely that a young Hashicorp would have opted for a license that didn’t allow IBM to eat their lunch.
  - slyall 3y ago
    One of the complaints about Hashicorp products was that they were not accepting any/many contributions from outsiders. Not sure if that was the case with vault.
    - starttoaster 3y ago
      It’s generally proper etiquette to discuss a contribution with repository maintainers within an Issue before writing the code. That’s just people putting themselves in awkward situations, in my opinion. The more mature a product company gets the more strict they start getting, too, out of necessity, for code standards and styles. Enforcing styles on community contributions is often a difficult balance between keeping consistency and seeming like a jerk. Sadly, people aren’t always as thoughtful with their contributions as you’d sometimes like them to be. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get some flack for saying this, but I help maintain some popular repositories and this has just been some of my observations. Especially with people not checking with the maintainers in an Issue before writing the code.

yellow_lead 3y ago

Care to comment anymore on this? I'm curious what the sentiment is within hashicorp

throwaway129472 3y ago
There's no overall consensus within engineering about the change itself. What is amusing is that most of the public response has been aimed at Terraform whilst internally Terraform wasn't the concern. Gruntworks and the others were not mentioned internally. It was Vault. It was IBM.
- jsiepkes 3y ago
  Interesting. I'm curious, was it fear of IBM or was there a concrete threat from IBM which was already eating Hashicorp's lunch and was an existential threat? I have a hard time imagining why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering unless they would already be up until their necks into IBM stuff. I also wouldn't really expect the IBM and Hashicorp customer base to overlap much?
  - natbennett 3y ago
    “Application Modernization” is a huge deal in enterprise. In practice this means some combination of “make it slightly easier to get production traffic to new Java apps” and “deploy a lot of Kubernetes clusters.” Really they want the former but the k8s became a proxy for the capability. It’s why IBM bought RedHat. Hashicorp products are a very big part of this world. I’d expect that basically every IBM customer also uses Hashicorp products, but they may or may not have a commercial relationship with Hashicorp.
  - stanac 3y ago
    > why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering Because everyone know IBM and mostly only devs know about Hashicorp. There is that saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    IBM has lots of old enterprise mindshare. Existing relationships are the value. Selling Vault just becomes another line item in your IBM contract. Very similar how AWS just repackages open source products and sells them themselves (Elastic). If you don’t protect yourself from these entrenched enterprise marketing machines, you’re dead. (Brought Vault into an old, stodgy org, was a schlep)
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
      There’s even a whole cottage business around getting your app on the AWS marketplace and handling billing through AWS. Once it’s on the marketplace it becomes much more appealing to a set of B2B customers because it’s way easier internally to just add some $X,000 line item to your AWS ‘cloud’ bill than to go though the lengthy procurement and approval process of onboarding a new vendor
- cipherboy 3y ago
  I don't think this is a valid take. Some, like myself, have left over this issue. Many discussions happened in private for various obvious reasons. But your reasoning at the end was not my understanding. That said, I have nothing but respect for my former colleagues there. Some of the best engineers have I worked with are still at Hashicorp. :-) Disclaimer: Views my own, not that of any past, present, or future employer.
brabel 3y ago
How would you feel if your products were forked by a big business that had already been commercializing your open source code (legally, admittedly) while making no contributions back?
- ahtihn 3y ago
  Don't release your products under permissive open source licenses if you're not happy when that happens.
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    That’s smart today. But it was always my perception that up until a couple of years ago, when all this ElasticSearch v AWS drama began, that it was historically part of some kind of social contract in open source tooling to use permissive licenses. This was just my perception of consumers of open sourced tooling, so your mileage may vary. Very recently it seems there’s been a surge of people noting acceptance of less permissive licenses, and in this landscape I think it’s more likely that a young Hashicorp would have opted for a license that didn’t allow IBM to eat their lunch.
- slyall 3y ago
  One of the complaints about Hashicorp products was that they were not accepting any/many contributions from outsiders. Not sure if that was the case with vault.
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    It’s generally proper etiquette to discuss a contribution with repository maintainers within an Issue before writing the code. That’s just people putting themselves in awkward situations, in my opinion. The more mature a product company gets the more strict they start getting, too, out of necessity, for code standards and styles. Enforcing styles on community contributions is often a difficult balance between keeping consistency and seeming like a jerk. Sadly, people aren’t always as thoughtful with their contributions as you’d sometimes like them to be. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get some flack for saying this, but I help maintain some popular repositories and this has just been some of my observations. Especially with people not checking with the maintainers in an Issue before writing the code.