24 ms·

IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

558 points by amateurhuman 2y ago

lma21 2y ago
> IBM will pay $35 per share for HashiCorp, a 42.6% premium to Monday's closing price Is that an insane premium or what?
- jedberg 2y ago
  Yeah, congrats to the people who held the stock yesterday!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- NewJazz 2y ago
  I think typical premium is about 20% for acquisitions. The amount may have been negotiated prior to this month's downturn, which Hashicorp was hit pretty hard by (they had about a 10% fall based on what I'm seeing).
  - mdasen 2y ago
    Yea, I think it often depends on where a company's stock has moved recently. IBM's offer is still below HashiCorp's 52-week high. That means there's probably a lot of current investors who likely wouldn't approve a deal at a 20% premium. If your stock is near its 52-week high, then a 20% premium looks a lot more reasonable. April-August of last year, HashiCorp was regularly above a 20% premium over Monday's close. Many investors might think it would get back there without a merger - and it had been higher. IBM is offering $35/share which is close to the $36.39 52-week high. In some cases, investors are delusional and just bought in at the peak. In other cases, a company's shares have been under-valued and the company shouldn't sell itself cheaply. I don't think one can really have a fixed percent premium for acquisitions because it really depends. Is their stock trading at a bargain price right now? Maybe people who believe in the stock own a lot of the company and don't have more capital to buy shares at the price they consider to be a bargain - but would vote against selling at that bargain price even if they can't buy more. They're confident other investors will come around. An acquiring company wants to make an offer they think will be accepted by the majority of investors, but also doesn't want to pay more than it has to. If the stock has been down and investors think it's a sinking ship, they don't have to offer much of a premium. If the stock is up a ton and investors sense a bubble, maybe they don't have to offer much of a premium. If the stock has been battered, but a lot of shareholders believe in it, then they might need to offer more of a premium.
    - kensey 2y ago
      Analyst consensus I've seen on long-term price has been floating around $32-34 per share. Take that with as much salt as you think it needs but it's at least interesting that it's within shouting distance of (but not over) the IBM offer.
- rwmj 2y ago
  It was a 63% premium when IBM bought Red Hat. Sadly I'd sold my RSUs about 2 days before :-(
  - dralley 2y ago
    Same, but with ESPP stock, and it was a few months earlier. Ouch.
  - NewJazz 2y ago
    I still voted no.
teeray 2y ago
Thereby really putting the Corp into HashiCorp.
wmf 2y ago
Official: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp-Inc-Creating-a-Comprehensive-End-to-End-Hybrid-Cloud-Platform https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp... Confirming what everybody knows, IBM views HashiCorp's products as Terraform, Vault, and some other shit.
- amateurhuman 2y ago
  From HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm
- bogantech 2y ago
  But what about the dozens of us using Nomad and Vagrant?
  - aragilar 2y ago
    "Additional products – Boundary for secure remote access; Consul for service-based networking; Nomad for workload orchestration; Packer for building and managing images as code; and Waypoint internal developer platform" - Vagrant doesn't even get a mention...
achristmascarl 2y ago
terraform changed to business source license pretty recently too: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
- dralley 2y ago
  Considering IBM sided with the fork, I suspect it'll be reverted for most or all of Hashicorp's projects.
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    That is the kind of thing that could have been a kind of negotiation tactic for purchasing Hashicorp, not necessarily done in good faith.
    - rezonant 2y ago
      Hashicorp's relicensing could also have been a tactic to get the sale to happen.
    - kensey 2y ago
      IBM didn't just fork Vault to make a statement -- IBM Cloud Secrets Manager was (openly) built directly on Vault OSS.
  - rezonant 2y ago
    I bet they'll organize it under Red Hat, and Red Hat will apply their open source policy to it, and that will involve reverting to OSI approved licenses
    - calgoo 2y ago
      I mean, they bought Red Hat, and killed CentOS; I can say after 25 years in enterprise IT, I have zero trust in IBM to keep any open source licensing "open".
achristmascarl 2y ago
terraform changed to business source license pretty recently too: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
- worik 2y ago
  > terraform changed to business source license pretty recently Now we know why!
  - jrockway 2y ago
    I worked at a startup that got acquired by a big company and we switched our custom proprietary license back to Apache 2 after acquisition. The reason we switched in the first place was because it's what we thought was best when we were out on our own. Being owned by a hardware company, you can have the software for free. (We still sell licenses and have a cute little license key validator, though.)
  - glenngillen 2y ago
    I suspect you have the causality on this backwards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579175
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Wow, I read that thread with great interest at the time, and reading it now knowing about the acquisition is quite the mind blowing experience.
ceocoder 2y ago
Once again, thank you 'mitchellh for Vagrant, I'm sure you have heard this many times before but it really changed the way we worked for the better in every way.
kickofline 2y ago
Will we see Red Hat / IBM Terraform?
- op00to 2y ago
  Never. Red Hat is focused on Ansible.
vdfs 2y ago
My fear of missing out by not using any HashiCorp product is officially over
mkovach 2y ago
So, will they now add JCL extensions to HCL? Will they be pulling TCL into the fold be the next plan?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- phlakaton 2y ago
  They'll do what they should have done years ago: give up on all this fuddy duddy syntax and just go with XML. ;-)
  - doubled112 2y ago
    Was this supposed to make my eye twitch? Don’t give them any ideas.
    - tecleandor 2y ago
      Don't worry, IBM has you covered! https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/datapower-gateway/10.5.x?topic=20-jsonx https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/datapower-gateway/10.5.x?topic=2...
      - doubled112 2y ago
        Oh God, of course they do.
    - phlakaton 2y ago
      The good news is, you no longer need Dhall or some crazy scripts to generate your Terraform files. Just a bit more XML and an XSLT stylesheet oughta do it!
justinsaccount 2y ago
Not unexpected, I saw a comment a ways back when they started with the BSL stuff that it had nothing to do with terraform, but was a response to IBM selling Vault.
brian_herman 2y ago
Community fork https://opentofu.org/ https://opentofu.org/
- ohad1282 2y ago
  Indeed. Owned by The Linux Foundation, so this will remain OSS forever/no rug pulls are possible.
  - takeda 2y ago
    Tomorrow's title: "Linux Foundation joins IBM to accelerate the mission of multi-cloud automation and bring the products to a broader audience of users and customers." ;)
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    I wouldn't bet on that, some Linux Foundation hosted projects like Zephyr, not only don't have anything to do with Linux, they are under licenses that are quite business friendly as well. So yeah, one can always fork the last available version, if it then survives to the extent that actually matters beyond hobby coding is seldom the case. How many Open Solaris forks are actually relevant outside the company that owns those forks? Also IBM, Microsoft, Oracle,.... and others that HN loves to hate are already members.
jakozaur 2y ago
Should we migrate to OpenTofu?
- wmf 2y ago
  Since IBM loves the Linux Foundation it's not impossible that Terraform and OpenTofu will merge like GCC and EGCS back in the day.
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    Exactly. Now that they own it, they can just roll back the license change and tap into the rest of the world doing the heavy lifting in terms of development. Hashicorp retired from that role when they changed the license. Win win for IBM. They offer stability to their big corporate clients and they get to resell the work done by third parties. The BSL license is an obstacle to that because it means they have to reinvent wheels internally. Changing the license back means they can gut the R&D department at the price of a simple license change and focus instead on sales, support, and consulting.
geekodour 2y ago
I've spent last 3 days learning nomad for my homelab setup, hope things stay more or less the same for it :)
- wmf 2y ago
  Nomad will indeed stay the same if all future development ceases.
- chucky_z 2y ago
  Nomad has a remarkably strong community for it's size. I'm almost positive it will continue to live in some format, even if completely hard-forked. I know if nobody else does anything I will do something myself, personally. I love Kubernetes, however I feel like things like Nomad and Mesos have a space to exist in as well. Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. :)
  - orthecreedence 2y ago
    > Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. Same. I'm not a fan of the recent licensing changes and probably won't use it for any new installations, but Nomad enabled me to be an entire ops team AND do all my other startupy engineer duties as well with minimal babysitting. It really just works, and works fantastically for what it is. Nomad is like the perfect mix of functional and easy to manage.
    - sunshine-o 2y ago
      The question is what to replace it with? There doesn't seem to be enough forces to create a MPL fork but at the same time we have a gap between "Docker Compose is enough" and running Kubernetes. Because there are many situations where going Kubernetes (or even lighter k0s, k3s type setups) does not make any sense. My guess is no organisation which can afford to dedicate resources to contribute or create a fork need Nomad. So we end up with a big gap in the ecosystem.
      - 2y ago
heipei 2y ago
Here's hoping they don't run great tools like Consul and Nomad into the ground somehow. If I'm ever forced to ditch Nomad and work with a pile of strung-together components like k8s I might just quit tech altogether.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Terrible news. New startups should be buying IBM. Not the other way around.
- soraminazuki 2y ago
  Like how Google bought Doubleclick and definitely not the other way around?
  - miningape 2y ago
    Oh if only - it seems like somehow the shittiest culture manages to out survive the other and entrench itself inside the business. I know HN likes to blame this on the stock market forcing short term revenues but I think it goes deeper - the good "culture" employees actively flee these environments. Boeing acquiring McDonald Douglas is a classic example of this exact scenario: "McDonald Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money."
    - soraminazuki 2y ago
      Both can be true at the same time, though. With one reinforcing the other.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Heh, interesting example because DoubleClick kinda did take over Google.
- dralley 2y ago
  IBM has ~280,000 employees. There's no sensible way for a company like IBM to be acquired by a startup.
- racl101 2y ago
  A startup like Microsoft? lol. IBM is pretty fucking huge still.
- rank0 2y ago
  Lmao. Which startup has ~$200B to buy out IBM? Folks are loopy in startup land!
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Some more discussion yesterday ahead of the deal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303
- dang 2y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170 comments)
candiddevmike 2y ago
I wonder how this will work with Red Hat. Traditionally, Red Hat and HashiCorp competed more directly than other IBM portfolio products, fighting over the same customer dollars.
- throwup238 2y ago
  Number one rule of megacorp M&A: Juice quarterly numbers first, ask capital allocation efficiency questions never.
renegade-otter 2y ago
The copy could not be more IBM: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm Accelerate! Multi-cloud! Automation!
roschdal 2y ago
Overpriced, haha.
- beastman82 2y ago
  Agree, this number seems enormous. Maybe there is a big stream of hosted services revenue that I'm just not participating.
  - shawabawa3 2y ago
    Hashicorp is public. It's like a 15% premium on what their stock was trading at so it can't be too overpriced (or at least, more than it was already)
  - paulddraper 2y ago
    It's "only" 15% above market. (Which is not unusual for an aquisition.)
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    It’s ~10x their revenue which is not crazy in saas. If anything it’s underpriced only because of current economic headwinds
- praveenweb 2y ago
  12x multiple for a Cloud SaaS company is not overpriced typically. I was surprised at this low multiple. Could be due to the current economic situation. And also the licensing changes, lack of product moat contributing in the wrong time.
alando46 2y ago
Gg hashicorp
deleted 2y ago
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solardev 2y ago
I didn't know IBM still had money to throw around like that. What do they even do these days? Who are their customers?
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  IBM had ~$14B cash to start the year. Additionally, you don't need the full purchase price in cash to buy the company. You can do leveraged buyouts, etc.
  - czbond 2y ago
    IBM M&A person: "We'd like to buy you in all IBM stock! <jazz hands>" Hopefully someone at HashiCorp: "Hell no, cash please"
    - Disp4tch 2y ago
      IBM stock is basically cash. Limited growth potential, very stable, fat dividend.
    - mywittyname 2y ago
      Press release says it's all cash at $35/sh using cash-on-hand for the purchase.
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
      Ugh, and have you actually looked at IBM’e share price? Or is it this because IBM isn’t cool to you? A bit rich for a community that’ll go work for shares in some dinky web app startup.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - czbond 2y ago
        Yes I did, it was overextended by about 30 points yesterday
krooj 2y ago
[flagged]
ClassAndBurn 2y ago
Hashi never sold me on the integration of their products, which was my primary issue with not selecting them. Each is independently useful, and there is no nudge to combine them for a 1+1=3 feature set. Kubernetes was the chasm. Owning the computing platform is the core of utilizing Vault and integrating it. The primary issue was that there was never a "One Click" way to create an environment using Vagarent, Packer, Nomad, Vault, Waypoint, and Boundry for a local developer-to-prod setup. Because of this, everyone built bespoke, and each component was independently debated and selected. They could have standardized a pipeline and allowed new companies to get off the ground quickly. Existing companies could still pick and choose their pieces. On both, you sell support contracts. I hope they do well at IBM. Their cloud services' strategy is creating a holistic platform. So, there is still a chance Hashi products will get the integration they deserve.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  I was an extremely early user and owner of a very large-scale Vault deployment on Kubernetes. Worked with a few of their sales engineers closely on it - was always told early on that although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart, they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances (because of "security" which never really made sense their reasoning). During every meeting and conference I'd ask about Kubernetes support, gave many suggestions, feedback, showed the problems we encountered - don't know if the rep was blowing smoke up my ass but a few times he told me that we were doing things they hadn't thought of yet. Fast forward several years, I saw a little while ago that they don't recommend the only method of vault running on EC2, fully support kubernetes, and I saw several of my ideas/feedback listed almost verbatim in the documentation I saw (note, I am not accusing them of plagiarism - these were very obvious complaints that I'm sure I wasn't the only one raising after a while). It always surprised me how these conversations went. "Well we don't really recommend kubernetes so we won't support (feature)." Me: "Well the majority of your customers will want to use it this way, so....." Just was a very frustrating process, and a frustrating product - I love what it does, but there are an unbelievable amount of footguns laden in the enterprise version, not to mention it has a way of worming itself irrevocably into your infrastructure, and due to extremely weird/obfuscated pricing models I'm fairly certain people are waking up to surprise bills nowadays. They also rug pulled some OSS features, particularly MFA login, which kind of pissed me off. The product (in my view) is pretty much worthless to a company without that.
the_real_cher 2y ago
Is OpenTofu better?
- devjab 2y ago
  Hashicorp does so much more than terraform, but I don’t think OpenTofu is better than terraform. I’m not sure that was ever really an interesting issue, however, I think the main competition to terraform was/is things like Bicep. I know the decision makers in our shop spent quite a lot of time deciding between the two. Finally decided on bicep after a number of what has probably been the most boring workshops I’ve ever attended. I’m fairly certain they are very happy with that decision now though. Not so much because big blue is evil, but because now we’re only beholden to one evil (Microsoft) and not two. I don’t actually think Microsoft or IBM are evil. They are just not ideal from an European enterprise perspective because they are subject to an increasing amount of anti-non-eu legalisation and national/internal security issues.
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    TF, Vault, Packer, Consul, Nomad. Waypoint and Boundary don't seem all that useful. Vagrant has fallen by the wayside supplanted by Docker and K8S. Vagrant was the origin, but quickly went from FOSS to FOSS-washed when it reneged on VMware support as a premium-only, closed-source option. IBM is indistinguishable from Progress and Broadcom... it buys things and milks them while they decline. Microsoft just lacks taste and any sense of accountability for all of the vulnerabilities and exploit damage it has, and continues to, inflict on the world.
rzr999 2y ago
What happens to shares? Are people getting IBM stock or cash?
arcticgeek 2y ago
I guess this shows us how overvalued HCP IPO was.
yevpats 2y ago
[flagged]
calgoo 2y ago
Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.
- tithe 2y ago
  The timing of this acquisition, and the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements is perfect.
  - binarymax 2y ago
    Usually during an acquisition like this, the key staff are paid out after two years on board the new company. So not a non-compete, but an incentive to stay and get their payout. Most staff with no equity will leave quickly of course, so the invalidity of non compete will definitely help those souls.
    - cratermoon 2y ago
      "golden handcuffs" they call them.
  - unstatusthequo 2y ago
    Ban isn’t yet in effect and would have started discussions a while back. Plus, FTC ban is already being litigated by business groups, unsurprisingly.
- andrewstuart2 2y ago
  Honestly, Mitchell should still be very proud of what he built and the legacy of Hashicorp. Sure, the corp has taken a different direction lately but thanks to the licenses of the Hashicorp family of software, it's almost entirely available for forking and re-homing by the community that helped build it up to this point. E.g. opentofu and openbao. I'm sure other projects may follow and the legacy will endure, minus (or maybe not, you never know) contributions from the company they built to try to monetize and support that vision.
nkotov 2y ago
Certainly an interesting turn of events. I really enjoy using Terraform (and Terraform cloud) for work but the license changes made me cautious to integrate anymore.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  What was the licensing changes? I see a lot of references to it as though it was common knowledge, but I'm not aware of them. Edit: found something: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
  - rahkiin 2y ago
    Nobody else is bow allowed to make a public offering of a terraform-using product. That is, you can not provide terraform as a service. Gitlab, Azure DevOps, etc all have to move to something else as they can not provide terraform builders without a special license. This was a major blow to the participating open source community. The license bow used is also vague and untested.
    - williamDafoe 2y ago
      Also you should know that while the terraform language is okay (albeit a little too dogmatic in a functional programming sense for my tastes), the terraform cloud product (runners for terraform executions) is pretty terrible, slow, and overpriced, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory based on the terraform language. This encouraged at least 4 companies to launch terraform-cloud-like products, and rather than compete and provide better service, Hashicorp responded by saying "take it or leave it, internet!" and they closed the open-source license on the interpreter (BUSL)... At my previous company we were driven away from terraform cloud and into the arms of env0 ... when it often takes 10 minutes for an execution to begin and you have no other executions in progress you realize that the terraform cloud SAAS product is just a total joke...
      - thedougd 2y ago
chrisbolt 2y ago
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149095 Rumor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303
hbogert 2y ago
> By joining IBM, HashiCorp products can be made available to a much larger audience, enabling us to serve many more users and customers. I'm really wondering who is kidding who here. Is it IBM or Hashi?
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  It's a shame that HashiCorp gave up. The govt bans foreign competition like Tiktok and in house competition don't have the stamina. Doesn't bode well for capitalism.
  - dralley 2y ago
    "Give up" is not really the appropriate terminology, the board of directors are the only ones that really have a say in acquisitions, and if the offer was given with a sufficient premium their own choice is limited by willingness to face shareholder lawsuits if they turn it down.
- empressplay 2y ago
  IBM has its mitts into finance, defence, aerospace -- and these industries generally stick to IBM / IBM sanctioned products. So with IBM selling Vault / Boundary (in particular) they will get better adoption.
  - op00to 2y ago
    In my experience IBM uses the sexy stuff (used to be OpenShift) to get meetings then sells the same old boring IBM software and services after the initial meetings.
- JojoFatsani 2y ago
  Dude some 28 year old marketing rep wrote that copy, don’t take it seriously
deleted 2y ago
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EMCymatics 2y ago
How is Red Hat doing?
- dralley 2y ago
  Contrary to the HN narrative, pretty OK. Not perfect, I have complaints, but most of them aren't related to IBM specifically. IBM doesn't assert their will upon Red Hat anywhere near as strongly as HN seems to think they do and in particular the whole story about IBM killing CentOS is BS.
- op00to 2y ago
  I left Red Hat a bit after the IBM acquisition, and in my experience the management bullshittery was encroaching about a year after the deal closed. I hear their sales team are all frustrated and leaving due to IBM’s interference in Red Hat deals.
rdl 2y ago
Now to find Vault alternatives.
- dangtony98 2y ago
  You should look into Infisical: https://github.com/Infisical/infisical https://github.com/Infisical/infisical Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders.
liveoneggs 2y ago
Although I think they have very different use cases this means IBM own both Ansible and Terraform, both claiming to be IaC
- cdchn 2y ago
  Soon to be built into Ansible Automation Platform. Should only cost $100 per managed resource.
  - indigodaddy 2y ago
    Is the implication that we won’t be able to freely use ansible-playbook anymore, and/or development will end on the “freely” available one?
    - angulardragon03 2y ago
      No, the implication is that Terraform will become prohibitively expensive to use. AAP has been around for a while, as Red Hat’s downstream of (iirc) AWX. It’s also quite pricey, like Terraform may become.
      - indigodaddy 2y ago
        Thank you
- aodin 2y ago
  Although there is significant overlap between the two, I prefer Terraform for resource provisioning and Ansible for resource configuration.
  - DerpHerpington 2y ago
    Same, but now IBM will be able to merge them to create Terrible (or Ansiform). ;)
    - 2y ago
MangoCoffee 2y ago
Based on what happened to RedHat/CentOS. i hope there'll be some forks like Rocky Linux on all HashiCorp's products.
- thinkmassive 2y ago
  https://opentofu.org/ https://opentofu.org/ https://openbao.org/ https://openbao.org/ Backed by the Linux Foundation
foxandmouse 2y ago
I expected this when the terraform license changed. Not IBM specifically but it was obvious they weren't interested/ able to continue with their founding vision.
- paxys 2y ago
  Hashicorp had a $14 billion IPO in Dec 2021 and was trading at ~$4.7 billion right before the acquisition announcement. At that point it doesn't matter what the company or its founders want or what their long term vision is. Shareholders are in charge and heads are going to roll if the price doesn't get back up quick by any means necessary.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Yet another example of why I think it's a mistake to take your company public. If I put in the work to build up a successful business, no way would I ever let it be turned into a machine that ignores long term health for the sake of making the stock price go up.
    - paxys 2y ago
      While I would think that, realistically most of my principles are for sale for a few billion dollars.
      - chrishare 2y ago
        If anyone is listening, I'll gladly undercut this guy by a few orders of magnitude
        elzbardico 2y ago
        You need to let some head space for the inevitable bargaining, let's act as sensible cartel members and not undercut ourselves in a race to the bottom, capisce?
    - 2y ago
bloopernova 2y ago
If this accelerates migration away from Terraform towards a standard, open, IaC platform, then it's a good thing. Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by different tools, but an open standard instead. Be "interesting" to see what happens to the recently-renamed Terraform Cloud (now Hashicorp Cloud Platform Terraform :eyeroll:) Edited to add: I'm guessing the feature I want added to the terraform language server is never going to happen now. Terraform's language server doesn't support registries inside Terraform Cloud, it doesn't know how to read the token in your terraformrc. bleh.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  So basically you want OpenTofu. It's open source, you can make it do whatever you want, and there's a >0% chance your PRs will get accepted (compared to with HashiCorp)
- vundercind 2y ago
  > Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by different tools, but an open standard instead. God, please no. The worst thing about all these tools is the terrible formats they keep choosing. Given the directions we’ve (“cutting edge” programmers and server ops folks) chosen to go instead, leaving XML behind was a big mistake. I’d prefer something better, but yaml and json are so terrible that going back to xml would be an improvement.
  - dralley 2y ago
    Agree on YAML, disagree on JSON.
  - bloopernova 2y ago
    You'd write in a language designed for humans, and that would get translated into a language for computers. In other words, JSON. What are your reasons for disliking JSON?
    - vundercind 2y ago
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mathverse 2y ago
IBM will gut everything to the bone and send most of the jobs to India. There will be nothing worth of using pretty soon as we will all move to the next big foss thing.
- op00to 2y ago
  There is plenty of money to milk from existing customers using Vault. For everyone else, yes - time to move on.
dzonga 2y ago
funny how these things are sometimes. technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ? and put him in a closet somewhere. Given how Mitch, cranks out products -- could technically been cheaper than 6.4bn but then again IBM ain't hurting for cash.
- dbalatero 2y ago
  > technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ? That sort of vision/foresight seems fairly rare, I'd think particularly rare at an IBM type place.
  - objektif 2y ago
    It is extremely rare I would say. Also when you can buy a proven product why risk?
- primax 2y ago
  Simply put, IBM doesn't have the kind of foresight and restraint to do something like that and not fuck it up
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
So long, and thanks for all the time we spend maintaining and fixing our Terraform code rather than just deploying an instance manually once. (It's been great for my job security!)
spxneo 2y ago
so what are the alternatives now? preferably MIT licensed on github
- op00to 2y ago
  I’m going back to CFengine!
tiffanyh 2y ago
[Dup] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136
devhead 2y ago
I wonder if this may mean we will see the Terraform dogmatic approach to declining to implement much requested functionality in the name of "it doesn't fit our ideals" go by the wayside. I hope so, otherwise, OpenTofu here I come; or well, I'm sure someone's got a ML infra tool in the works by now. I always have mixed feelings when a software company like this grabs their bag and leaves the community that helped build them, high and dry; good for them but still bad for everyone else nine out of ten times.
dang 2y ago
Recent and related: IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170 comments)
orf 2y ago
Back in 2015 I discovered a security issue with some Dell software[1]. I remember vividly getting an email about a job opportunity based entirely on this from a company with a strange name, that after some googling made a thing called Vagrant. They seemed super nice but I was far too young and immature to properly evaluate the opportunity, so after a few emails I ghosted them out of fear of the unknown. In 2015 they had 50 employees and had just raised a 10 million series A[2]. Regardless of various things that have happened, or things that could have been, the company has pushed the envelope with some absolute bangers and we are all better for it, directly or indirectly. Regardless of what the general opinion is of Hashicorp’s future post-IBM, they made an impact and that should be celebrated, not decried or sorrowed over for lack of a perceived picture perfect ending. Such is life. 1. https://tomforb.es/blog/dell-system-detect-rce-vulnerability/ https://tomforb.es/blog/dell-system-detect-rce-vulnerability... 2. https://www.hashicorp.com/about/origin-story https://www.hashicorp.com/about/origin-story
- neurostimulant 2y ago
  I guess you're not active in hacker news around 2013 because vagrant was absolutely popular here a long time ago. Mitchell Hashimoto showed up a lot too when we're talking about vagrant back then. If only you had procrastinated more you might ended up as employee #51 :)
_akhe 2y ago
Question: Is the tldr of companies like these that they sell enterprise server software? And often own the hardware too (data centers)? And then sell a bunch of consulting services on top of that to Fortune 500s and governments? It's tempting to think "How are these guys even relevant anymore?" but IBM's making $60B+ a year with over $10B cash on hand, apparently from mostly "consulting services". For a lot of developers including me, I never think about IBM or HashiCorp (or Oracle, SAP, etc.) and it's hard to imagine why someone would want to use their software compared to something newer, friendlier, cheaper, and probably faster. Is it just relationships? Just curious how customers are actually getting value from an IBM or a HashiCorp or an Oracle.
- kevindamm 2y ago
  Terraform does help with managing medium-large fleets, and a lot of special sauce is the structured types corresponding to cloud platforms (dubbed "providers") and the different services they offer. You could write your own configuration language and launcher but Terraform has been tested against many setups and can manage rolling restarts and other deployment methods. It's modular so you can define the configuration of a single server and then say "bring up 20 of these, use this docker image, name them thus," etc. Vault for securely storing keys is also a convenient system component. Both can be spun up in production without having to go through Hashicorp directly, but they also offer a service for managing the current state of the deployment (some aspects of the system are not queried at runtime and must be kept in a lock file of sorts, and coordinated with others doing any production changes). Some teams will coordinate using an S3 folder or some other ACL'd shared storage instead of relying on Hashicorp Cloud. I find it's the closest thing to a public version of the service management tools I grew used to within Google, and it has been a driving force for the DevOps movement. I think something else could come along and do it better but it does seem like a lot of upkeep to retain parity with all the cloud services' products. I hope OpenTofu is successful, competition helps.
  - _akhe 2y ago
    Yeah I know of Terraform (for me it was via AWS) but I just wonder how it's that valuable. For personal use, I never drank the koolaid on IaaS to begin with. Always found PaaS to be a nicer experience and I like that it actually simplifies DevOps, doesn't add complexity like an AWS or GCP does. I figure if I want more control over the server I can just use a Linux on-prem (no cost) or virtual server and I can fully control the machine - where IaaS like AWS/GCP just feel like expensive jargon hell with too many products. For a larger org sure, you need regional deployments, IAM, and some other stuff - but mostly stuff that is peripheral to code and its hardware requirements. My favorite DevOps setup is my Raspberry Pi home server running Raspbian, love this thing - WiFi, touch screen so I can hold it like a mobile device or just set it down somewhere while it's serving several APIs, websites, etc. all the time including a local business in SF. Haven't stopped or restarted it in months. I look at some of these big, old behemoths, and just don't get it. Take Oracle - when you really get into what they "do" it's like... oh... so, a database? Right now they offer clone services of the other cloud providers too, and some other things, but it's mostly just those huge consulting contracts. I just wonder how they get them (and at those rates) if not for relationships, it doesn't seem like their technology is particularly good. Personally I run stuff like React sites on Vercel, backends on a mix of my Raspberry Pi and Heroku, and 1 thing still in GCP that I can't wait to port out of there. Still looking for a home for my LLMs. As an individual developer, I will probably embrace PaaS and convenience more and more with regards to DevOps, but yeah interesting to see where open-source Terraform goes - would be cool to see companies doing more customized infra internally instead of everyone using AWS.
CSMastermind 2y ago
Well I will immediately be pivoting my company off of their products.
atlantasun33 2y ago
What happens to the employees of Hashicorp?
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  Half are laid off. The other half get briefcases and pocket protectors and are told to wear ties (excluding Jerry Garcia brand) and black dress shoes. https://web.archive.org/web/20110220214126/http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywewore_33.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110220214126/http://www-03.ibm...
declan_roberts 2y ago
Congrats to Mitchell and all others involved. Not a bad place to end up after automating class sign-up at UW!
helloericsf 2y ago
Why IBM, not Kyndryl? It's interesting to see how it fits into the overall IBM org.
notnmeyer 2y ago
booooooooooo hiss
ergonaught 2y ago
Sad. Next up, Canonical, though they’ve been tilting sideways without an acquisition to push them.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I am betting on them being acquired by Microsoft, although nowadays Microsoft has their own Linux distributions, so maybe not.
Khaine 2y ago
Fuck. IBM is where companies go to die
osigurdson 2y ago
Terragone
geodel 2y ago
Well folks are already migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu. I am sure similar open source projects for other HashiCorp's products unencumbered with IBM business model will be out pretty soon. So all in all I think another big win for open source even if little indirectly.
jll29 2y ago
IBM is trying to increase its "AI revenue" through acquisitions, a standard MBA playbook move (although analysts see through this and often ask specifically for "organic" revenue instead to tease that apart from revenue via acquisitions). In the past, IBM was a technology leader, and probably still has substantial talent excellent inhouse, but from what I'm hearing it has become less appreciative of its researchers and engineers: for instance, my IBM friends lost any patenting activity related bonuses already several years ago. Also, the Watson debacle (trying to monetize the Watson brand and the (impressive) Watson Jeopardy challenge results by quickly acquiring a bunch of stuff, only to then sell it as "our Watson AI technology") didn't help bolster its reputation, but rather harmed it further. Companies like IBM and HP should go back to the roots, value science and engineering, take on bold blue-sky projects (don't leave those only to Musk!), and lead by example. Perhaps this could happen, but only with an engineer-scientist at the top instead of professional managers or bean counters (I'm not attacking the perormance of any individual here as I have not been following recent leadership activities of either company recently). It is unlikely, IMHO, that an acquired company can change the culture of the acquirer. The only time I've seen this happening was Nokia benefitting Microsoft's culture, but that's because they made Nokia's CEO Microsoft's CEO, which is not going to happen with any likelihood in IBM's case.
- dade_ 2y ago
  IBM is a finance company with a tech brand. Business units are black (profitable) or red. They buy them, juice their profits, eventually they extract too much, they turn red. They bundle a few husks together, sell them off eg. Lenovo, or IPO them eg. Kyndryl.
deleted 2y ago
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DrStartup 2y ago
it's dead Jim
hnthrow289570 2y ago
That's alright. HashiCorp stuff was 2nd tier compared to any offerings from the cloud providers themselves just because those providers' own solutions would get preference (obviously!). And cloud is the environment for 95% of app development these days. If HashiCorp stuff is destined to die, something else will eventually rise to fill its niche if it's still valuable. You can always count on technology to churn for no good reason. To avoid sounding completely pessimestic: don't discount an IBM comeback either, for the same churning reasons.
neom 2y ago
I think it's ok to tell this story now. Long long time ago when I was still at DO, I tried to buy HashiCorp. Well, I use "tried to buy" very loosely. It was when we were both pretty small startups, Joonas our Dir. Eng at the time was really into their tooling, thought it was very good plus Armon and Mitch are fantastic engineers. So I flew out from NYC to SF to meet with them "to talk". Well, I had no idea how to go about trying to buy a company and they didn't really seem that interested in joining us, so we stood around a grocery store parking lot shuffling our feet talking about how great Mitch and Armon are at building stuff and then I flew home. I think that's about as loosely as it gets when it comes to buying a company. Probably would have been a cool combo tho, who knows. Either way, they're great guys, super proud of them. <3
- berniedurfee 2y ago
  I was in a similar position in a company that _might_ have been able to make a good enough offer, but never could convince the brass how amazing a company it is and I never got any traction. Disappointing to hear about this, Hashicorp was an amazing company. C’est la vie…
  - neom 2y ago
    When I got back to NYC I said to my boss (our CEO) "we should probably buy HashiCorp" and he said "Yeah, probably" and then we never spoke of it again. We both knew the problem, even if we could have got it together to make an offer and had they been interested, we were growing considerably too quickly to integrate another business. It was a fun idea, and we had a good time entertaining it, but it wouldn't have worked. My shopping list during those years was NPM, Deis, Hashi and BitBalloon (now Netlify). These days: I generally think startups should do more M&A!
KingOfCoders 2y ago
As predicted here by several people on the license change.
matthewtse 2y ago
It's really sad to me that Hashicorp never found a monetization model that worked. 100% of the companies I worked for over the last 6 years all used Terraform, there really wasn't anything else out there, and though there were complaints, it generally worked. It really provided a lot of value to us, and we definitely would have been willing to pay. Though every time we asked, we wanted commitment to update the AWS/GCP providers in a timely fashion for new features, and they would never commit and tried to shove some hosted terraform service down our throats, which we would never agree to anyway due to IP/security concerns.
- matthewtse 2y ago
  Perhaps an open source fork of Terraform, where the cloud providers themselves maintain the provider repos, is the correct end-state. AWS started doing that in the last few years, assigning engineering resources to the open source TF provider repos. That way, the profit beneficiaries bear the brunt of the development/maintenance costs.
bzmrgonz 2y ago
Let's hope they don't try the Broadcom shenanigans on terraform!!
gagoako1995 2y ago
[dead]
bayindirh 2y ago
Good for them. Also, it's probably the time to archive my Vagrant Machines repository. I guess all HashiCorp tools will be rolling downhill for personal use.
hacknews20 2y ago
Oh dear! Any buyer but them!
DLA 2y ago
Sad. Here comes HashiWatson. IBM will totally trash Hashi’s awesome products is a sea of “enterprise” trash.
deleted 2y ago
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coachEnvy 2y ago
[dead]

558 points by amateurhuman 2y ago

> IBM will pay $35 per share for HashiCorp, a 42.6% premium to Monday's closing price Is that an insane premium or what?

jedberg 2y ago
Yeah, congrats to the people who held the stock yesterday!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
NewJazz 2y ago
I think typical premium is about 20% for acquisitions. The amount may have been negotiated prior to this month's downturn, which Hashicorp was hit pretty hard by (they had about a 10% fall based on what I'm seeing).
- mdasen 2y ago
  Yea, I think it often depends on where a company's stock has moved recently. IBM's offer is still below HashiCorp's 52-week high. That means there's probably a lot of current investors who likely wouldn't approve a deal at a 20% premium. If your stock is near its 52-week high, then a 20% premium looks a lot more reasonable. April-August of last year, HashiCorp was regularly above a 20% premium over Monday's close. Many investors might think it would get back there without a merger - and it had been higher. IBM is offering $35/share which is close to the $36.39 52-week high. In some cases, investors are delusional and just bought in at the peak. In other cases, a company's shares have been under-valued and the company shouldn't sell itself cheaply. I don't think one can really have a fixed percent premium for acquisitions because it really depends. Is their stock trading at a bargain price right now? Maybe people who believe in the stock own a lot of the company and don't have more capital to buy shares at the price they consider to be a bargain - but would vote against selling at that bargain price even if they can't buy more. They're confident other investors will come around. An acquiring company wants to make an offer they think will be accepted by the majority of investors, but also doesn't want to pay more than it has to. If the stock has been down and investors think it's a sinking ship, they don't have to offer much of a premium. If the stock is up a ton and investors sense a bubble, maybe they don't have to offer much of a premium. If the stock has been battered, but a lot of shareholders believe in it, then they might need to offer more of a premium.
  - kensey 2y ago
    Analyst consensus I've seen on long-term price has been floating around $32-34 per share. Take that with as much salt as you think it needs but it's at least interesting that it's within shouting distance of (but not over) the IBM offer.
rwmj 2y ago
It was a 63% premium when IBM bought Red Hat. Sadly I'd sold my RSUs about 2 days before :-(
- dralley 2y ago
  Same, but with ESPP stock, and it was a few months earlier. Ouch.
- NewJazz 2y ago
  I still voted no.

teeray 2y ago

Thereby really putting the Corp into HashiCorp.

wmf 2y ago

Official: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp-Inc-Creating-a-Comprehensive-End-to-End-Hybrid-Cloud-Platform https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp... Confirming what everybody knows, IBM views HashiCorp's products as Terraform, Vault, and some other shit.

amateurhuman 2y ago
From HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm
bogantech 2y ago
But what about the dozens of us using Nomad and Vagrant?
- aragilar 2y ago
  "Additional products – Boundary for secure remote access; Consul for service-based networking; Nomad for workload orchestration; Packer for building and managing images as code; and Waypoint internal developer platform" - Vagrant doesn't even get a mention...

achristmascarl 2y ago

terraform changed to business source license pretty recently too: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...

dralley 2y ago
Considering IBM sided with the fork, I suspect it'll be reverted for most or all of Hashicorp's projects.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  That is the kind of thing that could have been a kind of negotiation tactic for purchasing Hashicorp, not necessarily done in good faith.
  - rezonant 2y ago
    Hashicorp's relicensing could also have been a tactic to get the sale to happen.
  - kensey 2y ago
    IBM didn't just fork Vault to make a statement -- IBM Cloud Secrets Manager was (openly) built directly on Vault OSS.
- rezonant 2y ago
  I bet they'll organize it under Red Hat, and Red Hat will apply their open source policy to it, and that will involve reverting to OSI approved licenses
  - calgoo 2y ago
    I mean, they bought Red Hat, and killed CentOS; I can say after 25 years in enterprise IT, I have zero trust in IBM to keep any open source licensing "open".

achristmascarl 2y ago

worik 2y ago
> terraform changed to business source license pretty recently Now we know why!
- jrockway 2y ago
  I worked at a startup that got acquired by a big company and we switched our custom proprietary license back to Apache 2 after acquisition. The reason we switched in the first place was because it's what we thought was best when we were out on our own. Being owned by a hardware company, you can have the software for free. (We still sell licenses and have a cute little license key validator, though.)
- glenngillen 2y ago
  I suspect you have the causality on this backwards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579175
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Wow, I read that thread with great interest at the time, and reading it now knowing about the acquisition is quite the mind blowing experience.

ceocoder 2y ago

Once again, thank you 'mitchellh for Vagrant, I'm sure you have heard this many times before but it really changed the way we worked for the better in every way.

kickofline 2y ago

Will we see Red Hat / IBM Terraform?

op00to 2y ago
Never. Red Hat is focused on Ansible.

vdfs 2y ago

My fear of missing out by not using any HashiCorp product is officially over

mkovach 2y ago

So, will they now add JCL extensions to HCL? Will they be pulling TCL into the fold be the next plan?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
phlakaton 2y ago
They'll do what they should have done years ago: give up on all this fuddy duddy syntax and just go with XML. ;-)
- doubled112 2y ago
  Was this supposed to make my eye twitch? Don’t give them any ideas.
  - tecleandor 2y ago
    Don't worry, IBM has you covered! https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/datapower-gateway/10.5.x?topic=20-jsonx https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/datapower-gateway/10.5.x?topic=2...
    - doubled112 2y ago
      Oh God, of course they do.
  - phlakaton 2y ago
    The good news is, you no longer need Dhall or some crazy scripts to generate your Terraform files. Just a bit more XML and an XSLT stylesheet oughta do it!

justinsaccount 2y ago

Not unexpected, I saw a comment a ways back when they started with the BSL stuff that it had nothing to do with terraform, but was a response to IBM selling Vault.

brian_herman 2y ago

Community fork https://opentofu.org/ https://opentofu.org/

ohad1282 2y ago
Indeed. Owned by The Linux Foundation, so this will remain OSS forever/no rug pulls are possible.
- takeda 2y ago
  Tomorrow's title: "Linux Foundation joins IBM to accelerate the mission of multi-cloud automation and bring the products to a broader audience of users and customers." ;)
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I wouldn't bet on that, some Linux Foundation hosted projects like Zephyr, not only don't have anything to do with Linux, they are under licenses that are quite business friendly as well. So yeah, one can always fork the last available version, if it then survives to the extent that actually matters beyond hobby coding is seldom the case. How many Open Solaris forks are actually relevant outside the company that owns those forks? Also IBM, Microsoft, Oracle,.... and others that HN loves to hate are already members.

jakozaur 2y ago

Should we migrate to OpenTofu?

wmf 2y ago
Since IBM loves the Linux Foundation it's not impossible that Terraform and OpenTofu will merge like GCC and EGCS back in the day.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Exactly. Now that they own it, they can just roll back the license change and tap into the rest of the world doing the heavy lifting in terms of development. Hashicorp retired from that role when they changed the license. Win win for IBM. They offer stability to their big corporate clients and they get to resell the work done by third parties. The BSL license is an obstacle to that because it means they have to reinvent wheels internally. Changing the license back means they can gut the R&D department at the price of a simple license change and focus instead on sales, support, and consulting.

geekodour 2y ago

I've spent last 3 days learning nomad for my homelab setup, hope things stay more or less the same for it :)

wmf 2y ago
Nomad will indeed stay the same if all future development ceases.
chucky_z 2y ago
Nomad has a remarkably strong community for it's size. I'm almost positive it will continue to live in some format, even if completely hard-forked. I know if nobody else does anything I will do something myself, personally. I love Kubernetes, however I feel like things like Nomad and Mesos have a space to exist in as well. Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. :)
- orthecreedence 2y ago
  > Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. Same. I'm not a fan of the recent licensing changes and probably won't use it for any new installations, but Nomad enabled me to be an entire ops team AND do all my other startupy engineer duties as well with minimal babysitting. It really just works, and works fantastically for what it is. Nomad is like the perfect mix of functional and easy to manage.
  - sunshine-o 2y ago
    The question is what to replace it with? There doesn't seem to be enough forces to create a MPL fork but at the same time we have a gap between "Docker Compose is enough" and running Kubernetes. Because there are many situations where going Kubernetes (or even lighter k0s, k3s type setups) does not make any sense. My guess is no organisation which can afford to dedicate resources to contribute or create a fork need Nomad. So we end up with a big gap in the ecosystem.
    - 2y ago

heipei 2y ago

Here's hoping they don't run great tools like Consul and Nomad into the ground somehow. If I'm ever forced to ditch Nomad and work with a pile of strung-together components like k8s I might just quit tech altogether.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Terrible news. New startups should be buying IBM. Not the other way around.

soraminazuki 2y ago
Like how Google bought Doubleclick and definitely not the other way around?
- miningape 2y ago
  Oh if only - it seems like somehow the shittiest culture manages to out survive the other and entrench itself inside the business. I know HN likes to blame this on the stock market forcing short term revenues but I think it goes deeper - the good "culture" employees actively flee these environments. Boeing acquiring McDonald Douglas is a classic example of this exact scenario: "McDonald Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money."
  - soraminazuki 2y ago
    Both can be true at the same time, though. With one reinforcing the other.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Heh, interesting example because DoubleClick kinda did take over Google.
dralley 2y ago
IBM has ~280,000 employees. There's no sensible way for a company like IBM to be acquired by a startup.
racl101 2y ago
A startup like Microsoft? lol. IBM is pretty fucking huge still.
rank0 2y ago
Lmao. Which startup has ~$200B to buy out IBM? Folks are loopy in startup land!

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Some more discussion yesterday ahead of the deal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303

dang 2y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170 comments)

candiddevmike 2y ago

I wonder how this will work with Red Hat. Traditionally, Red Hat and HashiCorp competed more directly than other IBM portfolio products, fighting over the same customer dollars.

throwup238 2y ago
Number one rule of megacorp M&A: Juice quarterly numbers first, ask capital allocation efficiency questions never.

renegade-otter 2y ago

The copy could not be more IBM: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm Accelerate! Multi-cloud! Automation!

roschdal 2y ago

Overpriced, haha.

beastman82 2y ago
Agree, this number seems enormous. Maybe there is a big stream of hosted services revenue that I'm just not participating.
- shawabawa3 2y ago
  Hashicorp is public. It's like a 15% premium on what their stock was trading at so it can't be too overpriced (or at least, more than it was already)
- paulddraper 2y ago
  It's "only" 15% above market. (Which is not unusual for an aquisition.)
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  It’s ~10x their revenue which is not crazy in saas. If anything it’s underpriced only because of current economic headwinds
praveenweb 2y ago
12x multiple for a Cloud SaaS company is not overpriced typically. I was surprised at this low multiple. Could be due to the current economic situation. And also the licensing changes, lack of product moat contributing in the wrong time.

alando46 2y ago

Gg hashicorp

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

solardev 2y ago

I didn't know IBM still had money to throw around like that. What do they even do these days? Who are their customers?

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
IBM had ~$14B cash to start the year. Additionally, you don't need the full purchase price in cash to buy the company. You can do leveraged buyouts, etc.
- czbond 2y ago
  IBM M&A person: "We'd like to buy you in all IBM stock! <jazz hands>" Hopefully someone at HashiCorp: "Hell no, cash please"
  - Disp4tch 2y ago
    IBM stock is basically cash. Limited growth potential, very stable, fat dividend.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    Press release says it's all cash at $35/sh using cash-on-hand for the purchase.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    Ugh, and have you actually looked at IBM’e share price? Or is it this because IBM isn’t cool to you? A bit rich for a community that’ll go work for shares in some dinky web app startup.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - czbond 2y ago
      Yes I did, it was overextended by about 30 points yesterday

krooj 2y ago

[flagged]

ClassAndBurn 2y ago

Hashi never sold me on the integration of their products, which was my primary issue with not selecting them. Each is independently useful, and there is no nudge to combine them for a 1+1=3 feature set. Kubernetes was the chasm. Owning the computing platform is the core of utilizing Vault and integrating it. The primary issue was that there was never a "One Click" way to create an environment using Vagarent, Packer, Nomad, Vault, Waypoint, and Boundry for a local developer-to-prod setup. Because of this, everyone built bespoke, and each component was independently debated and selected. They could have standardized a pipeline and allowed new companies to get off the ground quickly. Existing companies could still pick and choose their pieces. On both, you sell support contracts. I hope they do well at IBM. Their cloud services' strategy is creating a holistic platform. So, there is still a chance Hashi products will get the integration they deserve.

JohnMakin 2y ago
I was an extremely early user and owner of a very large-scale Vault deployment on Kubernetes. Worked with a few of their sales engineers closely on it - was always told early on that although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart, they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances (because of "security" which never really made sense their reasoning). During every meeting and conference I'd ask about Kubernetes support, gave many suggestions, feedback, showed the problems we encountered - don't know if the rep was blowing smoke up my ass but a few times he told me that we were doing things they hadn't thought of yet. Fast forward several years, I saw a little while ago that they don't recommend the only method of vault running on EC2, fully support kubernetes, and I saw several of my ideas/feedback listed almost verbatim in the documentation I saw (note, I am not accusing them of plagiarism - these were very obvious complaints that I'm sure I wasn't the only one raising after a while). It always surprised me how these conversations went. "Well we don't really recommend kubernetes so we won't support (feature)." Me: "Well the majority of your customers will want to use it this way, so....." Just was a very frustrating process, and a frustrating product - I love what it does, but there are an unbelievable amount of footguns laden in the enterprise version, not to mention it has a way of worming itself irrevocably into your infrastructure, and due to extremely weird/obfuscated pricing models I'm fairly certain people are waking up to surprise bills nowadays. They also rug pulled some OSS features, particularly MFA login, which kind of pissed me off. The product (in my view) is pretty much worthless to a company without that.

the_real_cher 2y ago

Is OpenTofu better?

devjab 2y ago
Hashicorp does so much more than terraform, but I don’t think OpenTofu is better than terraform. I’m not sure that was ever really an interesting issue, however, I think the main competition to terraform was/is things like Bicep. I know the decision makers in our shop spent quite a lot of time deciding between the two. Finally decided on bicep after a number of what has probably been the most boring workshops I’ve ever attended. I’m fairly certain they are very happy with that decision now though. Not so much because big blue is evil, but because now we’re only beholden to one evil (Microsoft) and not two. I don’t actually think Microsoft or IBM are evil. They are just not ideal from an European enterprise perspective because they are subject to an increasing amount of anti-non-eu legalisation and national/internal security issues.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  TF, Vault, Packer, Consul, Nomad. Waypoint and Boundary don't seem all that useful. Vagrant has fallen by the wayside supplanted by Docker and K8S. Vagrant was the origin, but quickly went from FOSS to FOSS-washed when it reneged on VMware support as a premium-only, closed-source option. IBM is indistinguishable from Progress and Broadcom... it buys things and milks them while they decline. Microsoft just lacks taste and any sense of accountability for all of the vulnerabilities and exploit damage it has, and continues to, inflict on the world.

rzr999 2y ago

What happens to shares? Are people getting IBM stock or cash?

arcticgeek 2y ago

I guess this shows us how overvalued HCP IPO was.

yevpats 2y ago

[flagged]

calgoo 2y ago

Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.

tithe 2y ago
The timing of this acquisition, and the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements is perfect.
- binarymax 2y ago
  Usually during an acquisition like this, the key staff are paid out after two years on board the new company. So not a non-compete, but an incentive to stay and get their payout. Most staff with no equity will leave quickly of course, so the invalidity of non compete will definitely help those souls.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    "golden handcuffs" they call them.
- unstatusthequo 2y ago
  Ban isn’t yet in effect and would have started discussions a while back. Plus, FTC ban is already being litigated by business groups, unsurprisingly.
andrewstuart2 2y ago
Honestly, Mitchell should still be very proud of what he built and the legacy of Hashicorp. Sure, the corp has taken a different direction lately but thanks to the licenses of the Hashicorp family of software, it's almost entirely available for forking and re-homing by the community that helped build it up to this point. E.g. opentofu and openbao. I'm sure other projects may follow and the legacy will endure, minus (or maybe not, you never know) contributions from the company they built to try to monetize and support that vision.

nkotov 2y ago

Certainly an interesting turn of events. I really enjoy using Terraform (and Terraform cloud) for work but the license changes made me cautious to integrate anymore.

mywittyname 2y ago
What was the licensing changes? I see a lot of references to it as though it was common knowledge, but I'm not aware of them. Edit: found something: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
- rahkiin 2y ago
  Nobody else is bow allowed to make a public offering of a terraform-using product. That is, you can not provide terraform as a service. Gitlab, Azure DevOps, etc all have to move to something else as they can not provide terraform builders without a special license. This was a major blow to the participating open source community. The license bow used is also vague and untested.
  - williamDafoe 2y ago
    Also you should know that while the terraform language is okay (albeit a little too dogmatic in a functional programming sense for my tastes), the terraform cloud product (runners for terraform executions) is pretty terrible, slow, and overpriced, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory based on the terraform language. This encouraged at least 4 companies to launch terraform-cloud-like products, and rather than compete and provide better service, Hashicorp responded by saying "take it or leave it, internet!" and they closed the open-source license on the interpreter (BUSL)... At my previous company we were driven away from terraform cloud and into the arms of env0 ... when it often takes 10 minutes for an execution to begin and you have no other executions in progress you realize that the terraform cloud SAAS product is just a total joke...
    - thedougd 2y ago

chrisbolt 2y ago

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149095 Rumor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303

hbogert 2y ago

> By joining IBM, HashiCorp products can be made available to a much larger audience, enabling us to serve many more users and customers. I'm really wondering who is kidding who here. Is it IBM or Hashi?

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
It's a shame that HashiCorp gave up. The govt bans foreign competition like Tiktok and in house competition don't have the stamina. Doesn't bode well for capitalism.
- dralley 2y ago
  "Give up" is not really the appropriate terminology, the board of directors are the only ones that really have a say in acquisitions, and if the offer was given with a sufficient premium their own choice is limited by willingness to face shareholder lawsuits if they turn it down.
empressplay 2y ago
IBM has its mitts into finance, defence, aerospace -- and these industries generally stick to IBM / IBM sanctioned products. So with IBM selling Vault / Boundary (in particular) they will get better adoption.
- op00to 2y ago
  In my experience IBM uses the sexy stuff (used to be OpenShift) to get meetings then sells the same old boring IBM software and services after the initial meetings.
JojoFatsani 2y ago
Dude some 28 year old marketing rep wrote that copy, don’t take it seriously

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EMCymatics 2y ago

How is Red Hat doing?

dralley 2y ago
Contrary to the HN narrative, pretty OK. Not perfect, I have complaints, but most of them aren't related to IBM specifically. IBM doesn't assert their will upon Red Hat anywhere near as strongly as HN seems to think they do and in particular the whole story about IBM killing CentOS is BS.
op00to 2y ago
I left Red Hat a bit after the IBM acquisition, and in my experience the management bullshittery was encroaching about a year after the deal closed. I hear their sales team are all frustrated and leaving due to IBM’s interference in Red Hat deals.

rdl 2y ago

Now to find Vault alternatives.

dangtony98 2y ago
You should look into Infisical: https://github.com/Infisical/infisical https://github.com/Infisical/infisical Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders.

liveoneggs 2y ago

Although I think they have very different use cases this means IBM own both Ansible and Terraform, both claiming to be IaC

cdchn 2y ago
Soon to be built into Ansible Automation Platform. Should only cost $100 per managed resource.
- indigodaddy 2y ago
  Is the implication that we won’t be able to freely use ansible-playbook anymore, and/or development will end on the “freely” available one?
  - angulardragon03 2y ago
    No, the implication is that Terraform will become prohibitively expensive to use. AAP has been around for a while, as Red Hat’s downstream of (iirc) AWX. It’s also quite pricey, like Terraform may become.
    - indigodaddy 2y ago
      Thank you
aodin 2y ago
Although there is significant overlap between the two, I prefer Terraform for resource provisioning and Ansible for resource configuration.
- DerpHerpington 2y ago
  Same, but now IBM will be able to merge them to create Terrible (or Ansiform). ;)
  - 2y ago

MangoCoffee 2y ago

Based on what happened to RedHat/CentOS. i hope there'll be some forks like Rocky Linux on all HashiCorp's products.

thinkmassive 2y ago
https://opentofu.org/ https://opentofu.org/ https://openbao.org/ https://openbao.org/ Backed by the Linux Foundation

foxandmouse 2y ago

I expected this when the terraform license changed. Not IBM specifically but it was obvious they weren't interested/ able to continue with their founding vision.

paxys 2y ago
Hashicorp had a $14 billion IPO in Dec 2021 and was trading at ~$4.7 billion right before the acquisition announcement. At that point it doesn't matter what the company or its founders want or what their long term vision is. Shareholders are in charge and heads are going to roll if the price doesn't get back up quick by any means necessary.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Yet another example of why I think it's a mistake to take your company public. If I put in the work to build up a successful business, no way would I ever let it be turned into a machine that ignores long term health for the sake of making the stock price go up.
  - paxys 2y ago
    While I would think that, realistically most of my principles are for sale for a few billion dollars.
    - chrishare 2y ago
      If anyone is listening, I'll gladly undercut this guy by a few orders of magnitude
      - elzbardico 2y ago
        You need to let some head space for the inevitable bargaining, let's act as sensible cartel members and not undercut ourselves in a race to the bottom, capisce?
  - 2y ago

bloopernova 2y ago

If this accelerates migration away from Terraform towards a standard, open, IaC platform, then it's a good thing. Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by different tools, but an open standard instead. Be "interesting" to see what happens to the recently-renamed Terraform Cloud (now Hashicorp Cloud Platform Terraform :eyeroll:) Edited to add: I'm guessing the feature I want added to the terraform language server is never going to happen now. Terraform's language server doesn't support registries inside Terraform Cloud, it doesn't know how to read the token in your terraformrc. bleh.

0xbadcafebee 2y ago
So basically you want OpenTofu. It's open source, you can make it do whatever you want, and there's a >0% chance your PRs will get accepted (compared to with HashiCorp)
vundercind 2y ago
> Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by different tools, but an open standard instead. God, please no. The worst thing about all these tools is the terrible formats they keep choosing. Given the directions we’ve (“cutting edge” programmers and server ops folks) chosen to go instead, leaving XML behind was a big mistake. I’d prefer something better, but yaml and json are so terrible that going back to xml would be an improvement.
- dralley 2y ago
  Agree on YAML, disagree on JSON.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  You'd write in a language designed for humans, and that would get translated into a language for computers. In other words, JSON. What are your reasons for disliking JSON?
  - vundercind 2y ago

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mathverse 2y ago

IBM will gut everything to the bone and send most of the jobs to India. There will be nothing worth of using pretty soon as we will all move to the next big foss thing.

op00to 2y ago
There is plenty of money to milk from existing customers using Vault. For everyone else, yes - time to move on.

dzonga 2y ago

funny how these things are sometimes. technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ? and put him in a closet somewhere. Given how Mitch, cranks out products -- could technically been cheaper than 6.4bn but then again IBM ain't hurting for cash.

dbalatero 2y ago
> technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ? That sort of vision/foresight seems fairly rare, I'd think particularly rare at an IBM type place.
- objektif 2y ago
  It is extremely rare I would say. Also when you can buy a proven product why risk?
primax 2y ago
Simply put, IBM doesn't have the kind of foresight and restraint to do something like that and not fuck it up

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

So long, and thanks for all the time we spend maintaining and fixing our Terraform code rather than just deploying an instance manually once. (It's been great for my job security!)

spxneo 2y ago

so what are the alternatives now? preferably MIT licensed on github

op00to 2y ago
I’m going back to CFengine!

tiffanyh 2y ago

[Dup] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136

devhead 2y ago

I wonder if this may mean we will see the Terraform dogmatic approach to declining to implement much requested functionality in the name of "it doesn't fit our ideals" go by the wayside. I hope so, otherwise, OpenTofu here I come; or well, I'm sure someone's got a ML infra tool in the works by now. I always have mixed feelings when a software company like this grabs their bag and leaves the community that helped build them, high and dry; good for them but still bad for everyone else nine out of ten times.

dang 2y ago

Recent and related: IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170 comments)

orf 2y ago

Back in 2015 I discovered a security issue with some Dell software[1]. I remember vividly getting an email about a job opportunity based entirely on this from a company with a strange name, that after some googling made a thing called Vagrant. They seemed super nice but I was far too young and immature to properly evaluate the opportunity, so after a few emails I ghosted them out of fear of the unknown. In 2015 they had 50 employees and had just raised a 10 million series A[2]. Regardless of various things that have happened, or things that could have been, the company has pushed the envelope with some absolute bangers and we are all better for it, directly or indirectly. Regardless of what the general opinion is of Hashicorp’s future post-IBM, they made an impact and that should be celebrated, not decried or sorrowed over for lack of a perceived picture perfect ending. Such is life. 1. https://tomforb.es/blog/dell-system-detect-rce-vulnerability/ https://tomforb.es/blog/dell-system-detect-rce-vulnerability... 2. https://www.hashicorp.com/about/origin-story https://www.hashicorp.com/about/origin-story

neurostimulant 2y ago
I guess you're not active in hacker news around 2013 because vagrant was absolutely popular here a long time ago. Mitchell Hashimoto showed up a lot too when we're talking about vagrant back then. If only you had procrastinated more you might ended up as employee #51 :)

_akhe 2y ago

Question: Is the tldr of companies like these that they sell enterprise server software? And often own the hardware too (data centers)? And then sell a bunch of consulting services on top of that to Fortune 500s and governments? It's tempting to think "How are these guys even relevant anymore?" but IBM's making $60B+ a year with over $10B cash on hand, apparently from mostly "consulting services". For a lot of developers including me, I never think about IBM or HashiCorp (or Oracle, SAP, etc.) and it's hard to imagine why someone would want to use their software compared to something newer, friendlier, cheaper, and probably faster. Is it just relationships? Just curious how customers are actually getting value from an IBM or a HashiCorp or an Oracle.

kevindamm 2y ago
Terraform does help with managing medium-large fleets, and a lot of special sauce is the structured types corresponding to cloud platforms (dubbed "providers") and the different services they offer. You could write your own configuration language and launcher but Terraform has been tested against many setups and can manage rolling restarts and other deployment methods. It's modular so you can define the configuration of a single server and then say "bring up 20 of these, use this docker image, name them thus," etc. Vault for securely storing keys is also a convenient system component. Both can be spun up in production without having to go through Hashicorp directly, but they also offer a service for managing the current state of the deployment (some aspects of the system are not queried at runtime and must be kept in a lock file of sorts, and coordinated with others doing any production changes). Some teams will coordinate using an S3 folder or some other ACL'd shared storage instead of relying on Hashicorp Cloud. I find it's the closest thing to a public version of the service management tools I grew used to within Google, and it has been a driving force for the DevOps movement. I think something else could come along and do it better but it does seem like a lot of upkeep to retain parity with all the cloud services' products. I hope OpenTofu is successful, competition helps.
- _akhe 2y ago
  Yeah I know of Terraform (for me it was via AWS) but I just wonder how it's that valuable. For personal use, I never drank the koolaid on IaaS to begin with. Always found PaaS to be a nicer experience and I like that it actually simplifies DevOps, doesn't add complexity like an AWS or GCP does. I figure if I want more control over the server I can just use a Linux on-prem (no cost) or virtual server and I can fully control the machine - where IaaS like AWS/GCP just feel like expensive jargon hell with too many products. For a larger org sure, you need regional deployments, IAM, and some other stuff - but mostly stuff that is peripheral to code and its hardware requirements. My favorite DevOps setup is my Raspberry Pi home server running Raspbian, love this thing - WiFi, touch screen so I can hold it like a mobile device or just set it down somewhere while it's serving several APIs, websites, etc. all the time including a local business in SF. Haven't stopped or restarted it in months. I look at some of these big, old behemoths, and just don't get it. Take Oracle - when you really get into what they "do" it's like... oh... so, a database? Right now they offer clone services of the other cloud providers too, and some other things, but it's mostly just those huge consulting contracts. I just wonder how they get them (and at those rates) if not for relationships, it doesn't seem like their technology is particularly good. Personally I run stuff like React sites on Vercel, backends on a mix of my Raspberry Pi and Heroku, and 1 thing still in GCP that I can't wait to port out of there. Still looking for a home for my LLMs. As an individual developer, I will probably embrace PaaS and convenience more and more with regards to DevOps, but yeah interesting to see where open-source Terraform goes - would be cool to see companies doing more customized infra internally instead of everyone using AWS.

CSMastermind 2y ago

Well I will immediately be pivoting my company off of their products.

atlantasun33 2y ago

What happens to the employees of Hashicorp?

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Half are laid off. The other half get briefcases and pocket protectors and are told to wear ties (excluding Jerry Garcia brand) and black dress shoes. https://web.archive.org/web/20110220214126/http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywewore_33.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110220214126/http://www-03.ibm...

declan_roberts 2y ago

Congrats to Mitchell and all others involved. Not a bad place to end up after automating class sign-up at UW!

helloericsf 2y ago

Why IBM, not Kyndryl? It's interesting to see how it fits into the overall IBM org.

notnmeyer 2y ago

booooooooooo hiss

ergonaught 2y ago

Sad. Next up, Canonical, though they’ve been tilting sideways without an acquisition to push them.

pjmlp 2y ago
I am betting on them being acquired by Microsoft, although nowadays Microsoft has their own Linux distributions, so maybe not.

Khaine 2y ago

Fuck. IBM is where companies go to die

osigurdson 2y ago

Terragone

geodel 2y ago

Well folks are already migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu. I am sure similar open source projects for other HashiCorp's products unencumbered with IBM business model will be out pretty soon. So all in all I think another big win for open source even if little indirectly.

jll29 2y ago

IBM is trying to increase its "AI revenue" through acquisitions, a standard MBA playbook move (although analysts see through this and often ask specifically for "organic" revenue instead to tease that apart from revenue via acquisitions). In the past, IBM was a technology leader, and probably still has substantial talent excellent inhouse, but from what I'm hearing it has become less appreciative of its researchers and engineers: for instance, my IBM friends lost any patenting activity related bonuses already several years ago. Also, the Watson debacle (trying to monetize the Watson brand and the (impressive) Watson Jeopardy challenge results by quickly acquiring a bunch of stuff, only to then sell it as "our Watson AI technology") didn't help bolster its reputation, but rather harmed it further. Companies like IBM and HP should go back to the roots, value science and engineering, take on bold blue-sky projects (don't leave those only to Musk!), and lead by example. Perhaps this could happen, but only with an engineer-scientist at the top instead of professional managers or bean counters (I'm not attacking the perormance of any individual here as I have not been following recent leadership activities of either company recently). It is unlikely, IMHO, that an acquired company can change the culture of the acquirer. The only time I've seen this happening was Nokia benefitting Microsoft's culture, but that's because they made Nokia's CEO Microsoft's CEO, which is not going to happen with any likelihood in IBM's case.

dade_ 2y ago
IBM is a finance company with a tech brand. Business units are black (profitable) or red. They buy them, juice their profits, eventually they extract too much, they turn red. They bundle a few husks together, sell them off eg. Lenovo, or IPO them eg. Kyndryl.

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DrStartup 2y ago

it's dead Jim

hnthrow289570 2y ago

That's alright. HashiCorp stuff was 2nd tier compared to any offerings from the cloud providers themselves just because those providers' own solutions would get preference (obviously!). And cloud is the environment for 95% of app development these days. If HashiCorp stuff is destined to die, something else will eventually rise to fill its niche if it's still valuable. You can always count on technology to churn for no good reason. To avoid sounding completely pessimestic: don't discount an IBM comeback either, for the same churning reasons.

neom 2y ago

I think it's ok to tell this story now. Long long time ago when I was still at DO, I tried to buy HashiCorp. Well, I use "tried to buy" very loosely. It was when we were both pretty small startups, Joonas our Dir. Eng at the time was really into their tooling, thought it was very good plus Armon and Mitch are fantastic engineers. So I flew out from NYC to SF to meet with them "to talk". Well, I had no idea how to go about trying to buy a company and they didn't really seem that interested in joining us, so we stood around a grocery store parking lot shuffling our feet talking about how great Mitch and Armon are at building stuff and then I flew home. I think that's about as loosely as it gets when it comes to buying a company. Probably would have been a cool combo tho, who knows. Either way, they're great guys, super proud of them. <3

berniedurfee 2y ago
I was in a similar position in a company that _might_ have been able to make a good enough offer, but never could convince the brass how amazing a company it is and I never got any traction. Disappointing to hear about this, Hashicorp was an amazing company. C’est la vie…
- neom 2y ago
  When I got back to NYC I said to my boss (our CEO) "we should probably buy HashiCorp" and he said "Yeah, probably" and then we never spoke of it again. We both knew the problem, even if we could have got it together to make an offer and had they been interested, we were growing considerably too quickly to integrate another business. It was a fun idea, and we had a good time entertaining it, but it wouldn't have worked. My shopping list during those years was NPM, Deis, Hashi and BitBalloon (now Netlify). These days: I generally think startups should do more M&A!

KingOfCoders 2y ago

As predicted here by several people on the license change.

matthewtse 2y ago

It's really sad to me that Hashicorp never found a monetization model that worked. 100% of the companies I worked for over the last 6 years all used Terraform, there really wasn't anything else out there, and though there were complaints, it generally worked. It really provided a lot of value to us, and we definitely would have been willing to pay. Though every time we asked, we wanted commitment to update the AWS/GCP providers in a timely fashion for new features, and they would never commit and tried to shove some hosted terraform service down our throats, which we would never agree to anyway due to IP/security concerns.

matthewtse 2y ago
Perhaps an open source fork of Terraform, where the cloud providers themselves maintain the provider repos, is the correct end-state. AWS started doing that in the last few years, assigning engineering resources to the open source TF provider repos. That way, the profit beneficiaries bear the brunt of the development/maintenance costs.

bzmrgonz 2y ago

Let's hope they don't try the Broadcom shenanigans on terraform!!

gagoako1995 2y ago

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bayindirh 2y ago

Good for them. Also, it's probably the time to archive my Vagrant Machines repository. I guess all HashiCorp tools will be rolling downhill for personal use.

hacknews20 2y ago

Oh dear! Any buyer but them!

DLA 2y ago

Sad. Here comes HashiWatson. IBM will totally trash Hashi’s awesome products is a sea of “enterprise” trash.

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coachEnvy 2y ago

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