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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

"Kubernetes but with less stuff" is a valuable niche that I'm glad someone is targeting.

That's a fair point, I guess it depends on your use case. The risk, however, is that the powers that be at HashiCorp one day decide to abandon Nomad once they realize it will never be a profit centre for them.

Nomad is open source (or, at least, a significant subset of it is). Anyone is able to continue to improve it, even if Hashicorp is no longer paying people to work on it.

I used to do sales for an enterprise "open source" software product, so I get it, but the truth is as soon as someone stops paying people to keep the project going it will die.

Who pays for k8s development?

Google. Commoditizing the cloud is their strategy to make GCP relevant.

Question was rhetorical, I still appreciate the effort though.

Not at all. Hashicorp literally pays for all development of nomad. They're the only commits short of a small number of PRs. Kubernetes commits are from a wide array of companies, and Google is only one.

And just as with Kubernetes and Google, Nomad development can continue outside of Hashicorp if Hashicorp no longer decides to support it. Which org has a longer track record of deprecating almost everything they release? Not Hashicorp, and frankly, I’ll always trust Hashicorp versus Google based on the historical behavior and forward incentives of both.

It's not quite the same. Hashicorp controls whether PRs get merged. Google does not control whether PRs get merged into kubernetes. There's a long list of companies that do, including IBM, redhat, Huawei, etc. Sure, you can fork it, but now you have a separate repo that requires people to know about it.

I’m not trying to convince you. If k8s works for you, that’s great! I choose to work at places that pick Nomad instead. Best tool for the job.

Agreed, thanks!

Seems like some projects survive their parent company abandoning them like illumos (successor to opensolaris). It's not common, but also not impossible.

its hard to say illumos is in good shape compared to when opensolaris was being worked on by Sun, or Joyent however.

That's not enough, Basho (creators of Riak database) also made it open source. In fact after they went out of business Bet365 even purchased their proprietary code and made it open source, but the database is still considered dead.

The CEO addressed a similar comment on Twitter recently. From what he's saying, it seems Hashicorp is standing by Nomad for the foreseeable future. https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1247581788706197504

Nit: Mitchell is their CTO. Dave McJannet is their CEO. (source: https://www.hashicorp.com/about/ )

Micro-nit: Mitchell is Co-CTO w/ Armon being the other

It would be very odd if he said the opposite, since customers could be spooked. But saying it's going to be around is very different from saying it will always have a lot of resources on it going forward, especially compared to their cash cows of consul and vault.

"standing by" until they're not. If their VCs start applying pressure to dump the unprofitable projects and seek more profits, their tune will change in an instant. At the end of the day these are for-profit entities, and the only thing that matters is profit.

The only reason they're pursuing this strategy is because they think they can get a piece of the kubernetes market. If that doesn't pan out, they will dump nomad like a bad habit.

For-profit companies aren't open source charities.

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