7 ms·

> However, in order to sustain and support the dedicated team of engineers who maintain and build new charts and images, a subscription will be required if an o

by _cenw 1y ago

> However, in order to sustain and support the dedicated team of engineers who maintain and build new charts and images, a subscription will be required if an organization needs the images and charts built and hosted in an OCI registry for them. This is such a naive take. Bitnami images were a sign of goodwill, a foot in the door at places were the hardened images were actually needed. They just couldn't compete with the better options on the market. This isn't a way to fix it, it's extortion. This is the same thing Terraform Cloud did, and I don't think that product is doing so hot. > Essentially, Bitnami has been the Jenkins of the internet for many years, but this has become unsustainable. It's other people's software, so it's very rich of Bitnami to accuse anyone of freeloading when their only contribution is adding config options to software that maybe corresponds to a level 2 on the OperatorFramework capability scale[1] - usually more of a 1. [1]: https://operatorframework.io/operator-capabilities/ https://operatorframework.io/operator-capabilities/

debarshri 1y ago
Building Infrastructure company is challenging in 2025. Previously, you would prioritize traction among developers over focusing on revenue. But that does not work in 2025. You are expected to make money from the get-go and are left with only enterprise customers and boy, that category is hard, as everyone is competing for that slice.
- esseph 1y ago
  The outcomes of this behavior will be devastating and the problems will last for generations.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    Why?
    - withinboredom 1y ago
      Asking the billion dollar questions I see.
  - Maken 1y ago
    Most of these companies and technologies won't last that long.
    - tremon 1y ago
      Software generations are measured in months, maybe that's what they meant?
- imiric 1y ago
  > Previously, you would prioritize traction among developers over focusing on revenue. A.k.a. using open source as a marketing tactic to lure in customers, only to do a rug pull once the business gains enough momentum. > But that does not work in 2025. Good. It is an insidious practice. There are very few projects that actually do this properly without turning their backs on the users who made their products popular in the first place. > You are expected to make money from the get-go and are left with only enterprise customers and boy, that category is hard, as everyone is competing for that slice. The strategy of delivering valuable products that benefit users without exploiting them has always existed. The thing is that many companies choose the greedy and user hostile path, instead of running a sustainable business that delivers value to humanity and not just to shareholders, which is much more difficult. So I have no sympathy towards these companies.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- zaphar 1y ago
  The problem I think is that all the easy infrastructure problems have been solved and the market is crowded with those solutions. Solving the hard problems is probably where you could have a viable business but I don't really see that many companies trying to solve those: * Making mono-repos work for large companies. * Mixed language builds are still a ci/cd unsolved problems for most companies. * Testing strategies for Iac deployments. And more that I won't bother to list here.
  - pbronez 1y ago
    This would make a great blog post: high hanging fruit of digital infrastructure
- smsm42 1y ago
  So, you're saying in 2025 businesses are expected to actually make money? What a novel concept. Will the wonders ever cease? I mean, you could expect that thing where you borrow incessantly to "gain traction" and "produce growth" but never produce any returns on it to run for a bit, especially in a new field where becoming #1 is at premium. But it has to stop somewhere. So it looks like somewhere is here.
- latchkey 1y ago
  I have an infrastructure company and I'm focused 100% on developers. It definitely isn't easy, but I see it as the best path for the business.
j45 1y ago
Maybe the community can repackage it since Bitnami is only packaging.
- tedk-42 1y ago
  Naive take. That's like saying, "Honda isn't a car company, they're an assembly company because they don't mine the minerals to make the parts and rely instead on supply chains"
  - dig1 1y ago
    Well, Bitnami didn't produce own hardware stack either ;) Joke aside, it's not naive - CentOS, Alma, Rocky, Ubuntu... FOSS community has some experience with these things
    - tedk-42 1y ago
      I draw the line at if you write code, you're not just a 'packaging' company you're another software company. Might not be the 'purest' of code, but that's really just vanity to speak like that (as is referring to them as a 'packaging' company). I highly doubt assembly engineers think of web developers as just 'packaging' their OS calls.
      - j45 1y ago
        Web apps are just database wrappers. Programming languages are just bytecode wrappers. Assembly is just transistor wrappers. Solving problems is valuable, even if the value of problem solving eludes us from time to time.
darkwater 1y ago
> It's other people's software, so it's very rich of Bitnami to accuse anyone of freeloading when their only contribution is adding config options to software I'm not going to defend a corporation but this sentence feels very entitled. They were providing it for free, you could use it. They are not going to provide it for free anymore, you migrate to something else or self-maintain it and say "thank you for the base work you did I can use now"
- throw__away7391 1y ago
  When a project is abandoned, when updates are slow, when features people want are not being released, when tracking upstream dependency updates are delayed, sure, you are not entitled to anything and I’ll be the first one to say get off your butt and contribute. In the other hand when you engage with the community for years under an OSS/free context then once the community has invested in your project, learning it, creating learning resources for it, integrating it into their own projects, and you never communicated your intention to “wait until it gets big then then pull the rug” it feels like a disingenuous bait and switch. The reason it feels that way is because it is a disingenuous bait and switch. This is even more so the case when you built your project on top of other projects. I have no problem using a paid product or service or paying for support on a OSS product, but will never pay one of these bait and switch scams a dime, no matter how much engineering effort it takes.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    I understand the sentiment and where it comes from, and I'm not saying it's a good decision from Broadcom (I think it is a bad one indeed!). But still, this risk is part of the game. Even if it was full opensource and with a broad community, it was still a single vendor, not even a non-profit umbrella like the Apache or Linux Foundation. So, the risk of trusting a single vendor was there. The good thing of it being opensource is that someone else (company, community, foundation or whatever) can step in, fork it, and maintain it from now on, unlike what happens with proprietary software or SaaS.
  - chris_wot 1y ago
    It’s Broadcom. Don’t use anything from them unless you can’t avoid it. Same applies to Oracle.
pacifika 1y ago
If their contribution is minimal then the impact of this change should also be? But it appears it disruptive so they have been showing up for a long time and that’s one of the most difficult things.
kpcyrd 1y ago
> it's extortion That's a wild take for "somebody provided something for free but decided they don't want to anymore". Sucks for you, looks like you have to do your job yourself now.
- _cenw 1y ago
  What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on. I find that to be a pretty dishonest business model. I don't have any Bitnami images to replace, but I know a lot of people who do without ever having made that choice - and their bosses aren't going to pay Broadcom for the most part either. So you end up with overworked developers that now hate Broadcom and/or a whole lot of deployments that just break or never get updated. The number of people going "I can just switch over to the archive image, whatever" on the K8s subreddit alone is concerning.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    > What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on. You skipped the part where you bankrupt your competition in the space who can't afford to hemorrhage cash they don't have like a VC-backed startup can, hoover up all the customers, then charge more than the old guard industry did in the first damn place for a worse version of the same service, while also paradoxically paying any workers needed to provide said service even less than they were making before.
  - conor- 1y ago
    The Bitnami images and helm charts are just convenient repackaging of things that are already freely (gratis) available. There's nothing stopping you from still deploying Kafka or Redis, etc. into your k8s cluster without using the Bitnami helm chart or building your own charts. I think that's the point of above of "now you have to do your job" There's an evaluation that takes place when choosing to use something as an engineer, and the writing should have been on the wall the moment that Broadcom bought Bitrock to start planning to reduce dependency on those things.
pst 1y ago
You're not wrong. They add miniscule value. But what does that say about the people using these images who are now struggling to replace them?
- lillecarl 1y ago
  Packaging is not miniscule value, it's valuable gruntwork.
  - pst 1y ago
    A lot of work that apparently is not valued enough to justify paying for.
    - lillecarl 1y ago
      You could make the same argument against Linux, openssl, ffmpeg, compression algorithms, web browsers and so many more things. A select few will pay for the rest of us, but it's valuable to everyone who uses it. Broadcom just wants to squeeze anyone who can't do it themselves.
    - _cenw 1y ago
      The problem isn't paying for it, it's the extra workload of retrofitting authentication to all your things. I'd find this a lot more enticing if they just made you set a "i have a license or i am evaluating or i am not commercial" flag in Helm or fail the build. Plus the cost is extremely disproportionate, but some will pay it given the one month deadline.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      I'm mixed... I've spent the time to create installers and docker images for a couple things, mostly because I wanted them to exist for myself, that others found them useful was a cool side effect. Nothing to the breadth or scope of Bitnami though. That said, it seems to be a side effect of their business model that they don't feel they can offer for free, or otherwise choose not to in order to convince people to move. It seems there's nothing stopping someone from forking and/or continuing the packaging for apps they use based on where Bitnami is today. Cool. I'd personally like to see a lot of these hardening efforts upstream anyway... separating base images for build vs. runtime and more so with the "official" app images themselves. People do and should have different expectations from a lot of applications when packaged in a container vs. installed on a system.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
venkyvb 1y ago
I think this is now the Broadcom way !
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tw04 1y ago
>This is such a naive take. Bitnami images were a sign of goodwill, a foot in the door at places were the hardened images were actually needed. They just couldn't compete with the better options on the market. This isn't a way to fix it, it's extortion. This is the same thing Terraform Cloud did, and I don't think that product is doing so hot. You seem to be confused about who Broadcom is and how they operate. "Long term health" isn't a thing for them. They buy products that are embedded deeply in the fortune 500, cut 90% of the staff, and increase licensing and support 2-100x. They do not care if you are upset. They do not care if you're going to "find something else". They don't care if you build an entire campaign to decry what they're doing. They know the F500 cannot easily remove them, and that they will have at minimum 5 years to print cash on their service contracts. Sure, some of those F500s will sue them and try to stop the extortion via legal means, but they know that they'll either win, or at worst still be allowed to jack up prices even if a court rules it's not their original egregious asking price.

by _cenw 1y ago

debarshri 1y ago

Building Infrastructure company is challenging in 2025. Previously, you would prioritize traction among developers over focusing on revenue. But that does not work in 2025. You are expected to make money from the get-go and are left with only enterprise customers and boy, that category is hard, as everyone is competing for that slice.

esseph 1y ago
The outcomes of this behavior will be devastating and the problems will last for generations.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  Why?
  - withinboredom 1y ago
    Asking the billion dollar questions I see.
- Maken 1y ago
  Most of these companies and technologies won't last that long.
  - tremon 1y ago
    Software generations are measured in months, maybe that's what they meant?
imiric 1y ago
> Previously, you would prioritize traction among developers over focusing on revenue. A.k.a. using open source as a marketing tactic to lure in customers, only to do a rug pull once the business gains enough momentum. > But that does not work in 2025. Good. It is an insidious practice. There are very few projects that actually do this properly without turning their backs on the users who made their products popular in the first place. > You are expected to make money from the get-go and are left with only enterprise customers and boy, that category is hard, as everyone is competing for that slice. The strategy of delivering valuable products that benefit users without exploiting them has always existed. The thing is that many companies choose the greedy and user hostile path, instead of running a sustainable business that delivers value to humanity and not just to shareholders, which is much more difficult. So I have no sympathy towards these companies.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
zaphar 1y ago
The problem I think is that all the easy infrastructure problems have been solved and the market is crowded with those solutions. Solving the hard problems is probably where you could have a viable business but I don't really see that many companies trying to solve those: * Making mono-repos work for large companies. * Mixed language builds are still a ci/cd unsolved problems for most companies. * Testing strategies for Iac deployments. And more that I won't bother to list here.
- pbronez 1y ago
  This would make a great blog post: high hanging fruit of digital infrastructure
smsm42 1y ago
So, you're saying in 2025 businesses are expected to actually make money? What a novel concept. Will the wonders ever cease? I mean, you could expect that thing where you borrow incessantly to "gain traction" and "produce growth" but never produce any returns on it to run for a bit, especially in a new field where becoming #1 is at premium. But it has to stop somewhere. So it looks like somewhere is here.
latchkey 1y ago
I have an infrastructure company and I'm focused 100% on developers. It definitely isn't easy, but I see it as the best path for the business.

j45 1y ago

Maybe the community can repackage it since Bitnami is only packaging.

tedk-42 1y ago
Naive take. That's like saying, "Honda isn't a car company, they're an assembly company because they don't mine the minerals to make the parts and rely instead on supply chains"
- dig1 1y ago
  Well, Bitnami didn't produce own hardware stack either ;) Joke aside, it's not naive - CentOS, Alma, Rocky, Ubuntu... FOSS community has some experience with these things
  - tedk-42 1y ago
    I draw the line at if you write code, you're not just a 'packaging' company you're another software company. Might not be the 'purest' of code, but that's really just vanity to speak like that (as is referring to them as a 'packaging' company). I highly doubt assembly engineers think of web developers as just 'packaging' their OS calls.
    - j45 1y ago
      Web apps are just database wrappers. Programming languages are just bytecode wrappers. Assembly is just transistor wrappers. Solving problems is valuable, even if the value of problem solving eludes us from time to time.

darkwater 1y ago

> It's other people's software, so it's very rich of Bitnami to accuse anyone of freeloading when their only contribution is adding config options to software I'm not going to defend a corporation but this sentence feels very entitled. They were providing it for free, you could use it. They are not going to provide it for free anymore, you migrate to something else or self-maintain it and say "thank you for the base work you did I can use now"

throw__away7391 1y ago
When a project is abandoned, when updates are slow, when features people want are not being released, when tracking upstream dependency updates are delayed, sure, you are not entitled to anything and I’ll be the first one to say get off your butt and contribute. In the other hand when you engage with the community for years under an OSS/free context then once the community has invested in your project, learning it, creating learning resources for it, integrating it into their own projects, and you never communicated your intention to “wait until it gets big then then pull the rug” it feels like a disingenuous bait and switch. The reason it feels that way is because it is a disingenuous bait and switch. This is even more so the case when you built your project on top of other projects. I have no problem using a paid product or service or paying for support on a OSS product, but will never pay one of these bait and switch scams a dime, no matter how much engineering effort it takes.
- darkwater 1y ago
  I understand the sentiment and where it comes from, and I'm not saying it's a good decision from Broadcom (I think it is a bad one indeed!). But still, this risk is part of the game. Even if it was full opensource and with a broad community, it was still a single vendor, not even a non-profit umbrella like the Apache or Linux Foundation. So, the risk of trusting a single vendor was there. The good thing of it being opensource is that someone else (company, community, foundation or whatever) can step in, fork it, and maintain it from now on, unlike what happens with proprietary software or SaaS.
- chris_wot 1y ago
  It’s Broadcom. Don’t use anything from them unless you can’t avoid it. Same applies to Oracle.

pacifika 1y ago

If their contribution is minimal then the impact of this change should also be? But it appears it disruptive so they have been showing up for a long time and that’s one of the most difficult things.

kpcyrd 1y ago

> it's extortion That's a wild take for "somebody provided something for free but decided they don't want to anymore". Sucks for you, looks like you have to do your job yourself now.

_cenw 1y ago
What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on. I find that to be a pretty dishonest business model. I don't have any Bitnami images to replace, but I know a lot of people who do without ever having made that choice - and their bosses aren't going to pay Broadcom for the most part either. So you end up with overworked developers that now hate Broadcom and/or a whole lot of deployments that just break or never get updated. The number of people going "I can just switch over to the archive image, whatever" on the K8s subreddit alone is concerning.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  > What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on. You skipped the part where you bankrupt your competition in the space who can't afford to hemorrhage cash they don't have like a VC-backed startup can, hoover up all the customers, then charge more than the old guard industry did in the first damn place for a worse version of the same service, while also paradoxically paying any workers needed to provide said service even less than they were making before.
- conor- 1y ago
  The Bitnami images and helm charts are just convenient repackaging of things that are already freely (gratis) available. There's nothing stopping you from still deploying Kafka or Redis, etc. into your k8s cluster without using the Bitnami helm chart or building your own charts. I think that's the point of above of "now you have to do your job" There's an evaluation that takes place when choosing to use something as an engineer, and the writing should have been on the wall the moment that Broadcom bought Bitrock to start planning to reduce dependency on those things.

pst 1y ago

You're not wrong. They add miniscule value. But what does that say about the people using these images who are now struggling to replace them?

lillecarl 1y ago
Packaging is not miniscule value, it's valuable gruntwork.
- pst 1y ago
  A lot of work that apparently is not valued enough to justify paying for.
  - lillecarl 1y ago
    You could make the same argument against Linux, openssl, ffmpeg, compression algorithms, web browsers and so many more things. A select few will pay for the rest of us, but it's valuable to everyone who uses it. Broadcom just wants to squeeze anyone who can't do it themselves.
  - _cenw 1y ago
    The problem isn't paying for it, it's the extra workload of retrofitting authentication to all your things. I'd find this a lot more enticing if they just made you set a "i have a license or i am evaluating or i am not commercial" flag in Helm or fail the build. Plus the cost is extremely disproportionate, but some will pay it given the one month deadline.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    I'm mixed... I've spent the time to create installers and docker images for a couple things, mostly because I wanted them to exist for myself, that others found them useful was a cool side effect. Nothing to the breadth or scope of Bitnami though. That said, it seems to be a side effect of their business model that they don't feel they can offer for free, or otherwise choose not to in order to convince people to move. It seems there's nothing stopping someone from forking and/or continuing the packaging for apps they use based on where Bitnami is today. Cool. I'd personally like to see a lot of these hardening efforts upstream anyway... separating base images for build vs. runtime and more so with the "official" app images themselves. People do and should have different expectations from a lot of applications when packaged in a container vs. installed on a system.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

venkyvb 1y ago

I think this is now the Broadcom way !

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tw04 1y ago

>This is such a naive take. Bitnami images were a sign of goodwill, a foot in the door at places were the hardened images were actually needed. They just couldn't compete with the better options on the market. This isn't a way to fix it, it's extortion. This is the same thing Terraform Cloud did, and I don't think that product is doing so hot. You seem to be confused about who Broadcom is and how they operate. "Long term health" isn't a thing for them. They buy products that are embedded deeply in the fortune 500, cut 90% of the staff, and increase licensing and support 2-100x. They do not care if you are upset. They do not care if you're going to "find something else". They don't care if you build an entire campaign to decry what they're doing. They know the F500 cannot easily remove them, and that they will have at minimum 5 years to print cash on their service contracts. Sure, some of those F500s will sue them and try to stop the extortion via legal means, but they know that they'll either win, or at worst still be allowed to jack up prices even if a court rules it's not their original egregious asking price.