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> HashiCorp's financials don't look terrible, so I'm assuming this sale is more about individual holders cashing out? They don't look terrible now. But otherwi
by jillesvangurp 3y ago
> HashiCorp's financials don't look terrible, so I'm assuming this sale is more about individual holders cashing out?
They don't look terrible now. But otherwise their recent license change and loss of technical founder have caused a bit of a shift in their user base towards open source forks. Which over time might substantially devalue their growth perspective. Any new projects would default to open source tools and not their proprietary thing.
This is also what I see when consulting on Elasticsearch and Opensearch projects. Almost all my recent clients start out with Opensearch these days because it is the open source choice and they are (mostly) in AWS just a few short years after they announced their license change. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen with things like Terraform and Opentofu as well. Anyone considering making similar moves, there's a growing amount of cases where this ends with a fork.
So, yes, this is why they are selling now. Before it turns into a fire sale. To a buyer it might be attractive to milk existing accounts for a while. A smart buyer might even reverse the license change in order to get some prospect of growth and re-absorb the community. But barring that, it's going to be the usual deal of either companies like Oracle or some hedge fund squeezing this thing dry until there's nothing left.
- SloopJon 3y ago> a shift in their user base towards open source forks I wonder how we can verify this. If I look at HashiCorp's quarterly results,[1] revenue is up, and they're adding customers, but net dollar retention rate is trending down. OpenTofu has 3k followers to HashiCorp's 6.9k on Github. The opentofu/opentofu repo has 18.8k stars to 40.9k for hashicorp/terraform. Sentiment on a recent r/TerraForm thread seems decidedly mixed.[2] Are any of the (edit: other) forks of HashiCorp's viable yet? [1] https://ir.hashicorp.com/financial-information/quarterly-results https://ir.hashicorp.com/financial-information/quarterly-res... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/19egjs3/thoughts_on_opentofu/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/19egjs3/thoughts...
- candiddevmike 3y agoWhat is your definition of viable? I know large F500 orgs using OpenTofu. A lot of orgs that offer services to other orgs within an umbrella org or within a holding company noped out of terraform due to the licensing change.
- SloopJon 3y agoOpenTofu does seem to have reached a stable, usable release. I meant to ask whether any of the other forks are viable. OpenBao, e.g., doesn't seem there yet.
- cipherboy 3y agoPer https://github.com/orgs/openbao/discussions/147#discussioncomment-8535195 https://github.com/orgs/openbao/discussions/147#discussionco... the Alpha is slated for end of the month. No word on GA date yet.
- ckdarby 3y agoRevenue is up because a lot of their contracts will be over a 3-5 year term and they'll recognize the revenue each year of the contract. It'll take 3 to 5 years for the pain to be felt and another 3 to 5 years from that point to collapse because most companies will just pay the renewal to buy time to let the rest of the space mature. Source/bias: I see this happening all the time in the space. I gave a talk about why Terraform is dead and long live Pulumi.
- scapecast 3y agoThis. Pulumi is to Terraform what Figma was to InVision.
- Timshel 3y agoIf you read it as the fork having in 6 months around half the "reach" of the 9 years old Terraform; that's not exactly the best trend for them ...