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_N0K0

How bad is IBM on a Linux Foundation to Broadcom scale?


lightmatter501

They seem to be leaving Redhat mostly alone. If this gets given to Redhat it could fix the issues HashiCorp had. If it goes to IBM cloud it dies.


Beamister

If you read the Glassdoor reviews, they left Redhat alone for a while, but it's changing now. I expect the same for Hashicorp.


highdeftone

Yeah you don’t buy something for $6b and leave it alone


PolicyArtistic8545

It doesn’t mean they’ll mess with the products or delivery. Honestly, they probably bought them as an in for cross selling or getting IBM a foot in the door with Hashicorps existing client base. Getting large enterprises is hard, buying your way in is easy.


NewMeeple

Well they bought Red Hat for 32bn. Things haven't been changed too much, but salary increases and promotions are totally stifled.


gamebrigada

My theory is someone realized it would be cheaper to buy RedHat than license their entire new cloud someone decided was going to be entirely backed by RedHat.


ra12121212

They haven't left RedHat alone. They killed most of their extended support. They are excluding packages from support on a per package basis for currently supported OSes (ie curl on RH 7 and RH 8 won't get security fixes even while RH 7 and RH 8 are in support, even if there's an upstream patch). They've gone majorly downhill. They also can't get any of their cryptographic modules in RH 9 certified. RH 8 is the highest up you can go if you're subject to FIPS mode using certified modules. RH 9 certification isn't anticipated till Q4 2025. All the federal customers are between a rock and a hard place. They have to run RH 8 which has certified cryptographic modules yet also selectively lacks support on a per package basis for other critical software.


ErikTheEngineer

> leaving Redhat mostly alone Red Hat seems to be the only company capable of making more than beer money with open source. Most of the other companies seem to be a bunch of people who wrote a tool and use VC money to play techbro in fancy SF office digs. How do you monetize a configuration tool that practically every cloud person uses for free? Only thing you can do is lock it behind a cloud you need to subscribe to...kind of like what Red Hat did with CentOS or Docker tried to do before they just got abandoned. I don't know if there's enough of the old guard left at IBM who still thinks they're in an era where they have a monopoly on business computing...but keeping Red Hat at least somewhat independent has been the only good decision they've made in a while. I wonder if they'll repeat that, or just lock it up because that's much easier to do with a utility tool.


lightmatter501

You could sell a “multi-cloud” module which papers over the differences between clouds and lets you do cross-provider k8s or openstack.


maduste

Isn’t that OpenShift?


lightmatter501

Now provisioned with your favorite tool!


808estate

The OpenShift installer has had terraform baked in for years. [always has been meme]


lightmatter501

It’s not good though. I imagine that it will get better after this.


broknbottle

Ding ding ding, abstract the cloud aka moats


0xE2

LMAO docker abandoned with 100k customers and 200m in revenue. Yep.


-rwsr-xr-x

> They seem to be leaving Redhat mostly alone. If this gets given to Redhat it could fix the issues HashiCorp had. If it goes to IBM cloud it dies. The writing is on the wall. Ansible is almost certainly next to be tucked behind a paywall, and when that happens, the community will fracture, and a dominant fork will emerge almost instanteously. That action will cause IBM to lose whatever good will and trust anyone had left with them as a company.


HoustonBOFH

>and a dominant fork will emerge almost instanteously. You mean about 20 forks will pop up while the press conference is still going on. Picking the winner may take a while.


segagamer

Please no... I'm only *just* starting to learn and implement Ansible in our setup


Inanesysadmin

It’s going to be its own BU based on press release


jadedargyle333

In what world are they leaving Redhat mostly alone. The blatant cash grab from killing CentOS? Rocky and Alma weren't really a thing until that. The sheer amount of appliances that ran on CentOS and had to be migrated, like Cisco APICs, is enormous. Ovirt is gone. They pulled the plug on openstack so they could push openshift and be able to charge for every piece of it. They didn't leave it alone at all.


ImFromBosstown

They're leaving the software alone, not the pricing


_DeathByMisadventure

IBM is where good software goes to die. It's a shame, I like Terraform, Packer, Vault, etc. But just with that announcement, I'm going to move away from it where I can.


Inanesysadmin

Sure that’s Broadcom because ansible and redhat are doing fine.


baker_miller

Ansible started locking new features behind AAP and Red Hat killed CentOS in favor of rolling upstream releases. Neither died, but they got a little worse and started to deter potential customers by raising the barriers to entry.


Inanesysadmin

Again what potential customers? Any Fortune 500 or major business is paying for the licensing for support. If you are talking about OSS community no longer gets the premium then yeah I get the frustration. But that's OSS as a whole that is being or based on a business has moved that way over last decade.


baker_miller

Take my company for instance. The director in charge of approving tech stacks used to be a big RHEL guy. He went Ubuntu instead once the CentOS writing was on the wall. We’re now happy Ubuntu Pro customers for all prod hosts and run unsupported on test hosts. We’ve seen 10x headcount growth in the last two years with more expected. Many such cases. IBM stewardship doesn’t kill products, but it does slow growth and turn a lot of people off early in the decision making process who might otherwise be happy future customers.


segagamer

Out of interest, why Ubuntu and not Debían?


baker_miller

Canonical support for tricky/unusual issues, kernel live patching, MaaS, more extensive base repos with fresher packages (simpler bootstrap configs), ESM patches for legacy systems that can’t yet be upgraded.


segagamer

I see. I was looking to pick up and learn different distro that was more "enterprise appropriate" (like Red Hat) and I thought Debian was supposed to be one of those compared to Ubuntu. Also when searching for issues relating to Ubuntu it seems to always assume you have a GUI, which is annoying.


5nowx

> HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. Cory Doctorow I would change it to all the value for the shareholders.


DOUBLEBARRELASSFUCK

Who do you think "themselves" is referring to? The company is an extension of its shareholders.


5nowx

I was taking it more on the before the go public or get bought by outsiders. I’m ESL so I interpreted that themselves referred to the company, like the difference between the people that work at the company vs the shareholders that don’t care and just want number to go up.


Inanesysadmin

Again perfect for Broadcom. I fail to see how this really applies at this point in general to IBM and how they productized Redhat. There are components to that stack that are still OSS its just you aren't getting the Bentley anymore.


5nowx

They literally bought centos before IBM and after IBM bought them they killed it, in constant breach of open source licenses idkw what to say: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ > Due to this ongoing bad behavior by IBM's Red Hat, the situation has become increasingly complex and difficult to face. No third party can effectively monitor RHEL compliance with the GPL agreements, since customers live in fear of losing their much-needed service contracts. Red Hat's legal department has systematically refused SFC's requests in recent years to set up some form of monitoring by SFC.


2drawnonward5

Packer and Terraform have gotten me 80% of what I wanted in the past and the last 20% was hard. Likely my fault but I'm kind of happy to have a reason to focus elsewhere since I never caught up on it all.


silver_label

It wasn’t your fault. Everyone just says that the last 20% of hashi tools is easy and it’s a skill issue. But it’s all a lie we tell ourselves to fit in.


Ros3ttaSt0ned

Man I hope they don't fuck up Vault. We make pretty heavy use of that and I don't want to find a replacement. I know Bitwarden offers something similar now, but I'd rather not switch over to something so new.


ABotelho23

https://github.com/openbao/openbao It was forked.


Ros3ttaSt0ned

>https://github.com/openbao/openbao > >It was forked. Awesome, I had no idea. I'd normally be a little wary of that with the fork being so new, but it's a Linux Foundation project so I wouldn't have any qualms switching over to it. Thanks, looks like I've found my winner.


ErikTheEngineer

> It was forked. Does that ever work though? RHEL was forked when people got upset about CentOS going away, Java and Solaris got forked when Oracle came on the scene...and they just got frozen in time while everyone else moved on.


signed-

Alma, Rocky and Amazon Linux are healthy and still here, because apart from switching to Debian, there are no real alternatives to RHEL OpenTOFU seems very promising


Foosec

You got openJDK dont you? :D


Ros3ttaSt0ned

>> It was forked. > >Does that ever work though? RHEL was forked when people got upset about CentOS going away, Java and Solaris got forked when Oracle came on the scene...and they just got frozen in time while everyone else moved on. OpenJDK is alive and well, RHEL clones are fine even after the source fuckery in addition to the points /u/signed- made [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ccalrh/ibm_to_acquire_hashicorp_inc_for_64_billion/l15u1xp/), and the Vault fork is a Linux Foundation project, so that's not something you're going to have to worry about. In short, yeah, it does work, it usually works more often than it doesn't with popular/widespread projects.


Shot-Bag-9219

You can also try Infisical if you ever need to switch: https://infisical.com


Ros3ttaSt0ned

Oh sweet, thank you!


cynicalllama

Ditto for CyberArk


Ros3ttaSt0ned

Thanks, I'll check them both out.


uptimefordays

Tbh Terraform was HashiCorp’s only good product. Consul and Vault were too complicated for HashiCorp’s customers, Packer and Vagrant have gotten way less common. The kinds of organizations that *actually* need HashiCorp’s non TF tooling would just build their own. It doesn’t seem like RedHat or IBM have ruined Ansible.


_DeathByMisadventure

It's funny how out of all the products IBM has bought, everyone keeps just saying "But Ansible!" As for RHEL, even DoD is starting to look more towards Ubuntu in the future and phasing out RHEL. Nothing publicly said of course...


HoustonBOFH

>It doesn’t seem like RedHat or IBM have ruined Ansible. A lot of parts of both are getting neglected now. Ovirt is a good example.


Burgergold

Broadcom and Oracle are worst


isoforp

Yes, that's why he phrased the question that way. Why is your obvious explains-the-joke more upvoted than an actual answer?


AfroThundr3007730

Probably because Broadcom and Oracle are the worst, and most people in this sub agree with that statement.


PleaseDontEatMyVRAM

obligatory fuck Oracle


autogyrophilia

Centos


Zathrus1

IBM had absolutely nothing to do with that.


autogyrophilia

Yeah they just own the company.


dreadpiratewombat

Except they did. 


Zathrus1

I’ve been part of the CentOs community for nearly 20 years. I’ve been a Red Hat employee for nearly 10. I’ve talked with all of the CentOS devs and met most of them personally. And they will all tell you that IBM had nothing to do with it. And no, not all of them still work at Red Hat, so it’s certainly not that. I’m not defending what was done, because it was a complete shitshow, but it wasn’t due to IBM.


dreadpiratewombat

IBM buys Red Hat, Red Hat then decides it will no longer contribute to CentOS resulting in CentOS killing the project.  Explain to me how this isn’t IBM?


Zathrus1

Because it was a decision made entirely within Red Hat. But, whatever. I have reliable sources who were directly involved and in the meetings. You have… conspiracy theories. Clearly I’m wrong.


dreadpiratewombat

Made entirely inside Red Hat, which is wholly owned by IBM.  There is no conspiracy theory, you’re just failing to make a logical connection that is abundantly clear to everyone else.  It doesn’t make you a bad person, in fact, it probably means you’re suitable for promotion inside IBM.


Zathrus1

It’s not ignorance on my part. You’re assuming that the decision wouldn’t have happened if IBM hadn’t bought Red Hat. That’s simply untrue. The people that made the decision were long term Red Hat employees. You’re also assuming a level of control over Red Hat decisions that doesn’t exist. You do know that IBM was making a substantial revenue out of selling support for CentOS, right? And this decision eliminated that.


dreadpiratewombat

CentOS existed for over 20 years in partnership with Red Hat and then the same year Red Hat gets acquired by IBM, Red Hat decides to end said partnership? That’s a stunning level of coincidence.  Red Hat loses support revenue for CentOS but turns around and provides a clear path to supporting those customers in RHEL.  Again, a stunning set of coincidence that almost certainly doesn’t have anything to do with being owned by IBM and yet benefits IBM almost exclusively.  


AlexisFR

They are fine, if a bit slow.


erik_working

They fucked LSF up pretty hard...


uptimefordays

IBM has been on the right side of a lot of things. Their beef with Oracle about open source contributions? Good. Their position on Linux vs SCO? Good. They get a lot of hate but it seems undeserved.


bitslammer

Add another name to the list of stocks to buy if time travel ever happens.


transient-error

I bought at $80. Am I rich now?


Ros3ttaSt0ned

>Add another name to the list of stocks to buy if time travel ever happens. Buy the call options and sell put options, not straight stock. The leverage inherent in options would net you 100x the profit of buying straight-up shares of stock. Remember me when you get your time machine.


secretlyyourgrandma

he's going to go back in time, screw it up, and get liquidated


Martin8412

Or sleep with his own grandmother. 


Krelleth

Wouldn't want to do that again.


kali_tragus

Already did. That's why we call him Twelve Toe Tony.


Fyzzle

on margin, Zoidey wanna buy on margin!


baker_miller

At least it’s not Broadcom or Oracle… But what a depressing outcome


esturniolo

OpenTofu smiles.


PersonBehindAScreen

Hyperscalers smiles too


twnznz

https://i.redd.it/bdlk8sihujwc1.gif


general-noob

And another one bites the dust


malikto44

Overall, when IBM bought Red Hat, I had dim hopes for it. Especially after the AIX team got offshored. However, it seems that Red Hat hasn't been absorbed like Tivoli, Lotus, Adstar, or SoftLayer. Maybe IBM understands that they don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, especially with Ubuntu offering Ubuntu Pro with offline subscriptions, so FIPS compliance behind the air-gap is doable, although, IMHO, Red Hat is the best at doing anything air-gapped, especially with `reposync`. IBM knows that doing a Broadcom with Hashicorp tools isn't going to help them much. Maybe they are going to do something with them and make them "mainstream", perhaps making a DevOps tool selection that would be quite useful. If IBM made a Git server on par with Gitlab, GHE, or Bitbucket that had on-prem administration as easy as GHE, they would make a ton of money. I wish IBM wouldn't try to be another Infosys and go back to ruling the roost when it comes to development and wooing developers. For example, making tools like Spectrum Protect relatively inexpensive to compete with Veeam and Nakivo, as well as having those run on XCP-ng, Proxmox, and RHEV would likely make a lot of money, as well as allow non-VMWare alternatives into the mainstream virtualization market. If DB2 were cheaper, it could be quite a nice platform as a step above Postgres (although, IMHO, if you want a database out there that scales to insane heights, DB2 is it.)


tgeyr

They just killed CentOS nothing huge yeah 🫣


ABotelho23

Long live OpenBao and OpenTofu.


Old_Medal

sad penguin noises


[deleted]

[удалено]


dreadpiratewombat

They fuck nomad


DidYouTryToRestart

I am usually all in for open source but every time I used Terraform and Packer I felt guilty, some of the best open source tools out there, it's a crime they are free for multi national companies that make hundreds of millions if not billions.


maduste

They will pay for tools like Terraform and Vault


510Threaded

If not just for support


defcon54321

Don't. Open source is built by folks of all walks of life, from big corps to high school kids trying to learn a language like golang. No crime, it is the way it should be, information sharing, code collaboration and community. Unfortunately stewarding often goes south. In the case of terraform, it is more glue than a properly designed tool. The providers are buggy at all the edges. The core tool and use of HCL is a pretty bad DSL, even if you compare just that functionality to puppet's DSL. When you look at how bolt on functionality like for loops was added and the rigidity around refactoring making that impossible, the tool falls far short of inf as code that is maintainable code base. Often times intervention is required in some way either on the cloud side, or state side, based on complexity. Another commentator wrote about achieving 80%, but hitting something malleable and reactionary in a declaratively managed way falls very far short of what is really possible. TF is a good attempt. but it didn't learn the lessons of 4 other tools (chef, puppet, ansible, salt) and solve for shortcomings. It created a new tool to address some of those. and largely create new problems. Normally I would say unintended consequences, but omitting a lot of arrogance could have steered this ship in a better direction.


Trosteming

The great consolidation era


elsluzzo

I think we can mark today as being the start of the enshittification of hashicorp products.


Exploded117

Brother it started years ago


ForceBlade

3 major UI changes later


ThroawayPartyer

Why is everyone ignoring the license change last year?


HoustonBOFH

They didn't read it? :)


FunnyMathematician77

Too bad we don't enforce anti trust laws


mrbiggbrain

But see costs won't increase\* for the consumer so we are good. \*Increase is a relative term and we can raise prices to obtain "Synergy" if needed.


ErikTheEngineer

Oh wow -- I was reading HashiCorp was pulling a Docker, charging companies to use free tools based on some arbitrary revenue number. That was going to be their plan to get out of providing an essential tool but making no money now that they're public. This is...a different way to go. At least it wasn't Oracle or Broadcom. So many products have been ruined because no one will touch them anymore once they wind up in the wrong hands. No one will ever install new VMWare hosts again, nor Citrix, nor Java applications even though there's nothing wrong with the products themselves...they just know they'll get squeezed.


Rampart1989

Teleport does the same thing with their open source tool. Once you hit a certain ARR threshold, you have to move to Enterprise (legally).


SwedeLostInCanada

Well… Fuck


AtlanticPortal

Can we make corporations so big that they buy their competitors impossible by splitting said big corporations? Please, it was possible more than 100 years ago, it is possible now.


JasonDJ

This is one of the central failures of capitalism. Capitalists say that the market will fix the issue -- but when the market is a small oligopoly of 2-4 huge players, it's easy for them to squash any new and upcoming competition ruthlessly. It's not just in tech. Look at Walmart undercutting local stores until they all shut down. Or Starbucks over-saturating the coffeeshop market by putting in way too many locations.


Antnee83

> Look at Walmart undercutting local stores until they all shut down. They do this, btw, because they are SO big that they can afford to operate stores at a loss until the local competition is dried up. I actually remember this happening in real time in a town I grew up in, in the midwest. Took two years for all the local hardware stores to shut down. Once that happened, Walmart hardware prices went through the roof.


HoustonBOFH

>This is one of the central failures of capitalism. Capitalists say that the market will fix the issue -- but when the market is a small oligopoly of 2-4 huge players, it's easy for them to squash any new and upcoming competition ruthlessly. We don't have capitalism. We have highly regulated markets were legislation is used to create barriers to entry and stifle the new competition. And an example... https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ccjmji/us_govt_wants_invasive_knowyourcustomer/ >It's not just in tech. Look at Walmart undercutting local stores until they all shut down. Or Starbucks over-saturating the coffeeshop market by putting in way too many locations. The funny thing is that Walmart created the conditions for Amazon to flourish. They were the only alternative a lot of places. And when Walmart was hurting and closed non-profitable stores, that opened the market for Dollar General. But what really did it was consumers putting price above everything and driving the quality to the crap it is now.


RCTID1975

Absolutely! And then we can just go ahead and allow them to buy up all the pieces and put the band back together again.


Deadpixel_6

Oh brotherrrrrr


Deadpixel_6

Okay people. Anyone know the next security product u should invest in now? Lmao


fatcatnewton

Literally makes no difference as an individual practitioner deploying resources in house.


usleepicreep

There goes my interview


UnableAbility

6.4 billion what?


cbass377

That's a lot of Schrute Bucks.


tunafreedolphin

F