Salt Project changes in policy | Hacker News Reader

Salt Project changes in policy

saltproject.io

12 pointsgtirloni4 comments

I only know of Salt by name, often mentioned together with Puppet, Chef and Ansible. Two things strike to me as a non-user that has landed on their home page:

* An automation tool owned by Broadcom? Haha very funny, I think I'll pass.

* The tag line on the home page: "Welcome to Salt Project. The largest, friendliest, and most active open source community in the world." — wow, that's very helpful. I was just thinking of joining a friendly open source community. This might be the blandest, least inspired home page I have ever seen for a product aimed at developers.

It takes three Page Downs to get to a mention that this is an infrastructure management tool. This to me is a huge red flag that whoever is running the show now is far, far removed from the original goal and aims of the product. I would not be surprised if Salt has turned into a vehicle for VMWare/Broadcom to get a foothold inside a company and sell them expensive addons and support plans.

Salt is genuinely awesome, I think it far outshines other tools in the same space.

Unfortunately the project has never done a great job communicating that, and the acquisition by VMWare, and subsequently Broadcom do not fill me with hope.

I hope it will go the way of StackStorm2 which used to live under the Broadcom shadow and is now part of the Linux Foundation thanks to some good souls at Extreme Networks

> I only know of Salt by name, often mentioned together with Puppet, Chef and Ansible

Unfortunately it's too late (thy've been, for most intents and purposes, dead since being acquired by VMware and even more so after Broadcom lit the whole thing on fire for fun), but SaltStack was by far the best Config Management tool out there. It had it all - lightning fast, very flexible, wild feature set (such as reactions and beacons), slightly awkward naming scheme.

> This reality has become much more solid in my mind over the last few months working inside of Broadcom. I have become a big fan of Hock Tan and his vision for Broadcom and VMware.

First, "last few months" when the acquisition closed end of November and we're in mid February is funny.

Second, I cannot imagine the type of person who sees this dumpsterfire of crash extractive rentseeking capitalism and "becomes a big fan".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com