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Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp
- gtirloni 3y agoHashicorp was always a role model for open source companies. Congratulations for that era. You achieved something impressive.
- thrillgore 3y agoKey word is "was."
- fishnchips 3y agoDrop the “Hashi”. Just Corp. It’s cleaner. Jokes aside, it's an end of an era. Mitchell has always been one of my role models both as an amazing engineer and a really decent, humble human being. I'm really looking forward to other amazing things he's going to build.
- teeray 3y agoCorpyCorp could work
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 3y agoCorpyMcCorpFace
- candiddevmike 3y agoExVMwareCorp may work.
- ergocoder 3y agoOr change it to ArmonCorp to balance it out.
- password4321 3y agoIs there any one individual or group responsible for HashiCorp's switch to BSL? From what I saw Mitchell let go of running the company and now that HashiCorp is not so cool anymore it's time to get out.
- echelon 3y agoThey built a ton of value, were unable to capitalize on it (just like early Docker), and when they tried to capture the value of the thing they built it pissed off the open source ecosystem (and all the profitable companies) built on top. They should have thought about this a long, long time ago. I feel for the smaller companies, but I feel for big companies that come in and plunder because of open license terms.
- fangorn 3y agoI recently concocted a (conspiracy) theory that relicensing of HC projects is a ploy to get IBM (or some other company happy to rain on IBM's parade) to finally make an offer. Mitchell leaving the company features in the theory as well. Basically it seems like since at least 2021 HC leadership and/or investors are exploring exit strategies that will bring in the beeeelions.
- tbcj 3y agoThat tracks. IBM acquiring Hashicorp was a persistent rumor I heard during my last year at IBM (timing was not long after the Red Hat acquisition).
- aeyes 3y agoHashicorp is a public company so the theory doesn't make much sense to me. The execs and early investors already made their money.
- candiddevmike 3y agoThey've been for sale since pre-IPO. Cisco almost bought them.
- 3y ago
- gobins 3y agoLooking forward to what Mitchell does next. I have always enjoyed reading his code, a fantastic role model.
- glenngillen 3y agoThis is what he's working on atm, including regular updates on progress: https://mitchellh.com/ghostty https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago[flagged]
- leetrout 3y agoThis negativity is unnecessary. Mitchell has had little to do with the issues Terraform faced and how things went. That responsibility belongs to others in eng leadership.
- dewey 3y ago> But I also hope you never make another OSS tool again. What a sad thing to say. If you picked a free open source tool that was not right for your use case maybe you should blame yourself.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- hathrowaway12 3y agoI hope you look back on this comment someday and are ashamed of it. It's unnecessary and unnecessarily harsh.
- fishnchips 3y agoWhile I'm not privy to any insider knowledge, from the outside it seems highly unlikely that Mitchell had anything to do with the trajectory of Terraform for the last few years. Also, it's possible that he wouldn't be able to defend himself against such arguments, having potentially signed some paperwork with his former company.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoCould you link to a few examples of the most painful PR denials? Isn't Terraform still considered one of the better cross-cloud automation tools?
- _vertigo 3y agoI think you should spend some time reflecting on this take and whether it makes sense for a (presumably competent) adult to have posted it.
- tiffanyh 3y agoThe sense I always got from the outside (I don't know him personally), is that Mitchell is just a really good engineer that wants to build great products. Nothing more. He's honest about what he's passionate about. Hence why he went from running the company to stepping back to being an IC. I've got a lot of respect for that. Below is his personal website, for those who haven't read his posts. https://mitchellh.com https://mitchellh.com
- debarshri 3y agoIt is interesting to see how hashicorp went from an underdog company with vagrant to a company to aspire for with terraform, nomad, consul, vault to something that orgs and community dread, all within a decade. Standards that they have set are still industry wide relevant. But you can see they are on a negative path.
- jen20 3y agoThis is a weird take. If anything, Nomad, Consul and Vault are on the ascent, as the realities of the CNCF ecosystem set in for people with results to deliver.
- geerlingguy 3y agoThe BSL licensing thing has turned off a lot of the more hobbyist/tinkerer-centric users who really rocketed HashiCorp's products up the ladder in their orgs. It's a bit like Elasticsearch, I think—it's gotten big enough it won't be a quick death, but I don't see Hashi's products growing/dominating as much now as I did a couple years ago. (As an aside, I'd like to thank Mitchell for his work over the years, Vagrant especially was huge in my infrastructure work, and Terraform was a great companion to Ansible and CloudFormation as we automated more and more stuff.)
- ak217 3y agoIt's true that the licensing change is a turnoff, but Terraform redefined an industry. What's the alternative? (I'm hoping Mitchell is going to have an answer to that)
- m1keil 3y agoHonestly feels a bit like the end of another great company - Chef (Adam Jacob). Great tooling, built with great engineers but business realities forced it to take some unfortunate turns. I hope Hashicorp will manage to find its stride and not end up as some bullet point in a long "solutions" portfolio of some software conglomerate. And thank you Mitchell for all the work. Can't wait to see what is coming next from you.
- lamroger 3y agoForgot about Chef... Good times...
- mdaniel 3y agoI can't speak to the "great company" part but Adam (and co's) current endeavor may interest you: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22system%20initiative%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... tl;dr = https://github.com/systeminit/si#readme https://github.com/systeminit/si#readme
- m1keil 3y agoYep, I am following them already. Cheers! :)
- revskill 3y agoNo mention about what's next ? Hm, why.
- jethronethro 3y agoDoubt there's anything sinister or shady about that. Maybe he doesn't have any plans. Or maybe he just doesn't feel like sharing those plans or doesn't feel obliged to share them.
- revskill 3y agoMy guess (could be wrong): He no longer enjoy writing Go.
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoSomething AI related no doubt
- pphysch 3y agoHe's been working hard on a really cool modern terminal emulator the last couple years, among other things I'm sure. https://mitchellh.com/ghostty https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
- unethical_ban 3y agoKids are a thing that can be next.
- fb03 3y agoMy suspicion is that he simply might spend some time with his newborn and enjoy life a bit after such a wild streak. He has more than enough financial resources to do that comfortably. He has stressed twice in the post that most of his life revolved around that company - Maybe it's time for that not to be anymore - simply put.
- cgopalan 3y agoMitchell is the only person I can think of who went through the cycle of tinkerer/IC -> founder -> CXO and then back to IC in his own company. Also, his writings on Zig has been tremendously helpful for someone like me who is curious about it. Huge respect from a fellow IC!
- kfrane 3y agoThe only other person I remember doing that is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer) Btw. he published a great read on how they started Autodesk https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/
- HatchedLake721 3y agoIC?
- hazzamanic 3y agoIndividual contributor
- bitwrangler 3y agoIndependent Consultant (my guess)
- andrelaszlo 3y agoIntegrated Circuit. Insatiable Craving. Irrevocable Crust. Indifferent Creator. Ignatios of Constantinople. Instigating Crime. Irritating C**. Individual Contributor. Your guess is as good as mine!
- mitchellh 3y agoWe've gone full circle! I originally launched Vagrant here on HN in 2010, which was at the top of HN very briefly for the day. Now here I am 14 years later witnessing my departure post in that very same spot. A strange experience! Thanks for the support over the years. A lot of the initial community for the projects I helped start came from here.
- awsanswers 3y agoI built a career following in your vision. Thank you 1000x
- philbert101 3y agoWell deserved Mitchel! Thank you for Vagrant, Packer, Consul, Vault and Terraform, all of which I used back in my DevOps days.
- leetrout 3y agoCongratulations, Mitchell! Many accomplishments and the ability to change an entire industry. One of a kind! Can't wait to see what else you get up to.
- jtreminio 3y agoMy first major foss was heavily based around Vagrant (PuPHPet). It was a joy building on top of your tooling to make web engineers lives easier. Thank you for your work, it was great while it lasted!
- ezekg 3y agoSome of my first OSS work was also based on Vagrant (https://github.com/ezekg/tj https://github.com/ezekg/tj). I eventually turned that into a commercial desktop app, built on top of that CLI project. Ultimately, the project didn't work out, but it was a big step in my open source and entrepreneurial journey. ty, mitchellh!
- conradfr 3y agoPuPHPet was very useful, I started many projects with it. I actually still have some projects with a Vagrant VM based on it that I have to move to docker compose or something.
- mugivarra69 3y agoterraform move killed it
- nodesocket 3y agoI use HashiCorp software nearly daily and think Terraform was the biggest eureka! moments for me. I've held HashiCorp since the IPO... Hasn't gone as planned so far, but holding on. Honestly, I expect an acquisition like Slack (just my hunch).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- danielhlockard 3y agoHey Mitchell, Best of luck in the future! I'm a nobody - but I was around in the packer days and wrote a post-processor and terraform provider for our vsphere back in the day. I don't think I'd be where I am now without those experiences. Thanks!
- x86x87 3y agoMitchell is an amazing human being. Met him in the hacking section of a conference and he was just this down to earth, really laid back dude. He was hanging out with us basically random people and didn't once bring up who he was and what he worked on.
- BobBagwill 3y agoEnjoy your family. Have fun. <ET>Beee goood!</ET>
- beoberha 3y agoVagrant is such an awesome tool. It’s been about a decade since I’ve used it in any capacity, but remember being wowed in my first internship when I could just spin up a VM like nothing. Best of luck, Mitchell!
- faeyanpiraat 3y agoWhat are you using instead of Vagrant for the same use case?
- nuker 3y agoJust a side thought, with all due respect: > The controversial worldviews such as multi-cloud that we founded this company on are now mainstream and broadly accepted. Emm .. no. It is not mainstream. Multi-cloud may be forced choice for some regulated fintech, but no sane project will double the infra codebase just to get from "lock-in". I see no other benefits. And double the codebase is quadruple the bugs. This is main Terraform's sales pitch, and it has to die. IMHO.
- acdha 3y agoSo I kind of agree that most projects don’t need multi cloud but any enterprise will have a bunch of different things which can be managed by Terraform. There is real value in being able to use the same tool to manage AWS/GCP/Azure/etc., Cloudflare, GitLab, VMware, and even racks of Cisco kit in the basement. If you’re doing it that way, you avoid most of those multicloud drawbacks because you’re using the full native functionality, not building abstraction layers or racking up technical debt by sticking with the lowest common denominator.
- nuker 3y ago> There is real value in being able to use the same tool to manage AWS/GCP/Azure/etc., Cloudflare, GitLab, VMware My bad, I did not define meaning of multi-cloud. I meant using AWS and GCP at the same time, doing mostly the same things, for redundancy and no lock-in. Still I prefer native IaaC tools, it is simpler, faster and more reliable. I'm AWS guy, so Cloudformation for all things infra. It irks me when I see Terraform doing AWS infra. I jump in to rewrite it as first matter of business, lol
- acdha 3y agoHeh, I have mostly worked on AWS but we stopped using CloudFormation because the experience was so much worse than Terraform with the lengthy deploys, no diffs, significant time delays supporting new AWS features, and deadlocks. They’ve added diffs but turning debugging into a half hour or longer break is still a problem.
- purpleidea 3y agoCongrats on leaving! The thing I always most respected about Mitchell was that he was actually often coding. So many "leaders" these days, are all talk and no action or skill. Maybe they had some git commits once upon a time, but I always felt like Mitchell was always coding throughout. Too bad what happened with the licensing stuff at the company though.
- abkolan 3y ago> Too bad what happened with the licensing stuff at the company though. OOTL here. What happened?
- purpleidea 3y agoThey switched to a proprietary license for all their products. Their CEO said some stuff in an interview. Their stock is plummeting. Check online yourself. Disclaimer, I am the author of a similar tool: https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/
- tekknolagi 3y agohttps://hackernoon.com/open-source-is-dead-understanding-the-hashicorp-license-controversy https://hackernoon.com/open-source-is-dead-understanding-the...
- TheRealPomax 3y agoTitle should probably be "Mitchell Hashimoto reflects as he departs HashiCorp". Lots of folks have no idea who "Mitchell" is without that key extra bit.
- scoot 3y ago> the GitHub Octoverse report found that HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) has once again emerged as one of the top languages used in open source projects "Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) with a 56,1% increase in popularity is the fastest-growing language according to GitHub" Fastest growing and "top" are not the same thing, but I have to assume that you know that @mitchellh. Embarrassed for you. https://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/
- raphlinus 3y agoFrom the 2023 Octoverse report[1], "In 2023, Shell and Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) once again emerged as top languages across open source projects, indicating that operations and IaC work are gaining prominence in the open source space." The accompanying chart shows it as #11, ranking above Dart, Kotlin, and Ruby. I think this is a case where the citation bears out the claim, and there's no need for Mitchell to feel embarrassment. [1]: https://github.blog/2023-11-08-the-state-of-open-source-and-ai/ https://github.blog/2023-11-08-the-state-of-open-source-and-...
- scoot 3y agoAh, thanks. I get to be embarrassed instead! I'll take it.
- ludwigvan 3y ago‘You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain…’ Great that Mitchell evaded that fate by getting out of the leadership before controversial moves by Hashicorp started occurring. His legacy will be untainted.
- thekevinwang 3y agoLegend
- issafram 3y agoGuy left and Terraform still has horrible logging
- yuppie_scum 3y agoTF plans seem pretty clean to me
- thrillgore 3y agoCongratulations on your exit. OpenTofu will continue the work you started.
- nanmu42 3y agoOut of topic but I can't help to notice the og:image of the web page is 57 MiB. https://www.datocms-assets.com/2885/1702507860-mitchell-hc19-edited.png https://www.datocms-assets.com/2885/1702507860-mitchell-hc19...
- thecleaner 3y agoCan we all take a moment to reflect how great is HN ? People have launched their software products here and gone on to become wildly successful or industry standards. I think our field is lucky we have a space where we can all enjoy people's successes, get inspired, be sourly or sarcastic (lol), have meaningful discussions and its all done with Lisp, HTML tables, an unstyled "add comment" button (please don't change) and a bunch of bare-metal servers which sometimes catch fire along with the discussions. Its quite wonderful.
- prmoustache 3y agoI can't help to read Mitchell's post as a "I am jumping of the boat before it sinks!"
- sverhagen 3y agoWould've found it really cool, had he somehow acknowledged the current upheaval. That said, I'm buying into the story that this was the plan all along. The breadcrumbs were there, from well before the licensing trouble.
- cies 3y agoTheir two most prominent project Terraform and Vault (as listed in first position on their won website) were recently forked: https://opentofu.org/ https://opentofu.org/ https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366563095/IBM-engineers-hatch-Linux-Foundation-HashiCorp-Vault-fork https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366563095... Their other offerings have very strong alternatives. I use Terraform and will certainly consider going with OpenTofu in the next upgrade.
- s0l1dsnak3123 3y agoI got really excited about Consul when I read about it here many years ago. I wrote a ruby library for it (https://github.com/WeAreFarmGeek/diplomat https://github.com/WeAreFarmGeek/diplomat) which became rather popular, and was used by quite a few large organisations. Hashicorp sent me a care package to thank me - a T-shirt and a card signed by Mitchell himself - I wore that T-Shirt until it was threadbare and I still have the card. Its a small thing on the grand scale of things, but it's something I look back on with pride. Well done to the Hashicorp team for getting to where they are now - by building something new and useful, and by fundamentally not being greedy.
- pas 3y agois this the same team that got greedy recently - which then lead to forking Terraform - or there's been some personnel changes?
- hendry 3y agoMitchell feels like the exception that proves the rule, the rule being that there are very few engineers turned entrepreneurs that are successful & balanced.
- guappa 3y agoIs he successful if the company is doing so bad?
- hendry 3y agohttps://ir.hashicorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hashicorp-announces-third-quarter-fiscal-year-2024-financial https://ir.hashicorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/... Hashicorp seems to be doing alright to me. Don't look at the stock price.
- guappa 3y agoI've never once in my life used something from hashicorp and thought it wasn't badly designed. Only reason I've used them is because someone at work set it up and left.
- totallywrong 3y agoThanks for the overall contribution to the space, IaC has definitely come a long way. But man don't ever give us another HCL please!
- ghthor 3y agoHCL is great, no scoping issues, easy to read and write, great auto format support, easy to incorporate into a go program(and extend with functions). I pick it up very consistently and am happy every time; while each time I have to write YAML I die inside.
- DLarsen 3y agoI remember near the start of HashiCorp, Mitchell and I spoke about buying one of his side projects. In seeking to rustle up some funds, friends asked me why anyone would offload a profitable project at such a price. Mitchell essentially explained that he was moving on to focus on bigger and better things. Boy was he right. Someone else beat me to the punch on buying the website, but Mitchell’s clarity of purpose was profound.
- T3RMINATED 3y ago[dead]
- aemadrid 3y agoThanks Mitchell for all the fish. Loved what you have done and can't wait to see what you come up with next.
- aemadrid 3y agoThanks for the fish Mitchell. Love what you have done and can't wait for what you will do next.
- zubairq 3y agoGood luck with the future.