IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says
reuters.com
reuters.com
Say what you will about big blue, they repeatedly seem to know who to acquire in order to buy themselves another 10 years of relevance.
People might make fun of this, but I'd like to note that there is a lot of very stable revenue in their business.
Hell, React alone has been through 3 or 4 different paradigms in the last 10 years.
I'll start: Jetbrains?
Sad, because GitLab was great for awhile. Then they stopped fixing bugs and started adding unneeded features, and made their pricing very expensive.
See page 17: https://www.ibm.com/annualreport/assets/downloads/IBM_Annual...
(AS/400 is midrange. They are called something else now, I heard. Maybe I-series.)
A lot of those indispensable infrastructure systems we all depend on, such as insurance, income tax, etc., run on mainframes, as they have for decades now.
So don't diss big iron / Big Blue.
I, for one, hope they have many years left, though I guess they could do with improving their corporate culture and business practices some.
On the downside they are materially responsible/accomplices to the crimes that are J2EE and XML ALL THE THINGS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhe...
JSON and YAML keep trying to re-invent the nice tooling ecosystem from XML, badly.
IBM had a lot to do with both XML and J2EE being used in the most Rube Goldbergian senses possible. They didn't invent XML either.
Sun, Oracle, Weblogic, IBM, Red-Hat, Rational, Microsoft, Pivotal, Apache Foundation,....
And if I have to chose between XML, endless annotations, anemic JSON, YAML spaghetti, I will take XML, thank you very much.
A while ago, so some details may be wrong.
Smalltalk (70s) came long before both Java (90s) and Visual Age (80s).
A small team of experts set out to take the experiences of the previous years of designing and implementing development environments. The result was Eclipse, a platform designed from the ground up as an integration platform for development tools."
FAQ Where did Eclipse come from?
One of the GoF guys, too.
Whoops! What a brain fart, or cosmic ray effect, or whatever :)
I meant to write:
>VisualAge for Java, which became Eclipse.
It was still possible to edit and correct my previous comment, but since people had replied already, I decided to correct myself in a reply to my own comment above.
Thanks, guys, for pointing out the mistake.
Terraform users can pick up their new alternative here:
and for those of you with Vault, you can find your new alternative here:
That process began happening long before the IBM acquisition when Red Hat hired Karanbir Singh (CentOS's maintainer) in 2014.
IIRC, I saw something about it on HN at the time, but did not read it, being busy.
So they acquihired CentOS, but in doing that they changed its target from "community of users [that don't want to pay for RHEL]" to "community of developers that target RHEL". CentOS Stream is much better (though not perfect) for the latter population.
That said, there are many people using CentOS Stream in production (including myself).
The community is better off with the combination of AlmaLinux + CentOS Stream.
AlmaLinux provides differentiation by supporting hardware and patches that Red Hat doesn't necessarily want to.
CentOS Stream provides a way for all downstream distros (Red Hat, Alma, Oracle, Rocky, whatever) to contribute back to the ecosystem in a way that is deeper than submitting bug reports to bugzilla.redhat.com
The latter point is something people really miss. CentOS was not much of an "open source" project in the same way that Android isn't much of an "open source" project. There was few ways to contribute directly beyond filing a bug report and waiting for Red Hat / Google to handle it. CentOS Stream is vastly more open as a project.
It was never quite that, but that was the theory.
The problem is because it was an exact clone of RHEL, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to have a proper community around it. Like I said it kind of revolved around "file a bug to Red Hat, wait for someone to pick it up, and then wait more for it to be shipped, which will be months away at best and could be years if it's not a paying customer's priority"
Before that I would pay $49 a year for it.
I totally get why CentOS was useful. I was briefly involved with Rocky when it first was getting started.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/07/06/what-quali...
But RHEL is free for limited production purposes also, to a maximum of 16 systems.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-introduces-free-rhel-f...
I'm biased (co-founder) but you should take a look at Infisical for secret management: https://infisical.com
Speaking for myself, but I do not get any monetary compensation from IBM and I suspect this is true for all of the other non-IBM contributors.
[0]: https://github.com/openbao/openbao/releases/tag/v2.0.0-alpha...
Finding conceptual forks, e.g. $(git push --mirror ...) would be trickier but I bet sourcegraph could do it
Ultimately, the question boils down to: what risk are you driving down: hitching your wagon to a dead stack, not getting security updates, not getting PRs merged, $other?
Before jumping straight into production k8s, something you can mess around with is using Podman to generate[0] and run[1] Kubernetes resources that you can parse through and familiarize yourself with. Paired with Podman Desktop[2] can produce a nice graphical environment. After that you could take a look at more production-simulating environments with minikube[3], OpenShift Local[4] (very much recommend if you have the resources to run it), and the no-cost OpenShift Sandbox[5].
In general, the Red Hat Developer[6] site has a lot of good resources to learn from, both passive and interactive. I highly recommend going through the courses and tutorials available if it can help your team skill up (assuming k8s is the direction you want to go in).
[0] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-generate.1....
[1] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-kube.1.html
[2] https://podman.io/features | https://podman-desktop.io/
[3] https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/
[4] https://developers.redhat.com/products/openshift-local/overv...
1) At least Ellison doesn’t end up with it
2) Consul should tend to bring down the aggregate complexity of IBM solutions just a little bit.
Now, they have their own company and would never go back, but they still have respect for those who choose the steady paycheck, low-risk career, and great (actually pretty incredible) benefits.
They're constantly doing small layoffs if not spinning off entire divisions. Even if you aren't personally affected, it's disheartening to find out when people you work with are the target of a "resource action". Their headcount has dropped 150K from 2010.
They did a weird sleight of hand a while ago where you only got a 401k match if you were employed at the end of the year. I see now that they've dropped all 401k matching and have shifted to some kind of small pension program instead.
It is sad that ctrl labs got eaten by fb/meta. It used ML to sense your arm movements (and one employee figured out how to have a virtual 3rd arm).
Collected by zuckerberg and disappeared.
(and if it does come to something, you'll need to log in to use it)
>beetle
TIL that genetic scientists have successfully crossed plants and animals! ;)
But, great comment. Upvoted.
In fact, it makes me wonder if the point of the recent license change to maximize revenue may have been to make them a more attractive acquisition.
It’s either terrible timing (missed on more money?) or he knew about it and decided months in advance that it’s not worth the trouble of staying on (ie, look at the aftermath of the RedHat and IBM acquisition).
[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/mitchell-reflects-as-he-depar...
Not a coincidence at all.
Hearing about the intention to sell and now IBM... well, that sucks.
Honestly, if they built a real scripting engine into OpenTofu, I'd be overjoyed. As it stands though, the declarative code (HCL) isn't the ugliest.
Come to the webinar tmrw, not quite a scripting engine but multilang no-custom-provider custom function support
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/opentofuorg_native-lua-more-i...
Apologies for the LI link I’m a startup CEO
We liken our model to git and GitHub, building the best service for the Pulumi engine and related tools.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/ibm-wins-another-ru...
Not the sort of thing you do for the hell of it.
I have another reason (whether or not that's "better" is arguable): because too big to fail is a thing and we've already seen what happens in other industries when big players buy out smaller ones.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ibm+ageism
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=ibm+&job=&city=&year=2023
https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/15/ibm_ceo_pay_jumps_23/
I work for Red Hat, acquired by IBM. None of the older developers working for Red Hat have been laid off. Actually developers as a group were mostly left intact by the one layoff we did have.
IBM is loaded with boomers with amazing jobs and pension plans that they're eager to dump if they can. They seem to want to keep good tech people while dumping the sweet deal boomers and non-tech where possible.
t. IBMer
He's a really good guy, and an excellent, and enthusiastic tech. One of the better folks that I've had the privilege to work with.
The stories (and there's a lot of smoke) that I hear, coming from IBM, are not comforting.
They make totally awesome mainframes, which are spectacularly expensive and tends to be existing customers updating than new companies buying them. All the research and engineering that they put into the mainframes is astounding. They remain a critical part of a vast number of financial transactions in the world.
I keep hoping companies will discover that they are really great for a few things But they are certainly not fashionable, and it does not appear that IBM has much interest in making them fashionable.
They have the iSeries which I believe is the successor to the AS/400. That was one amazing and utterly reliable machine. But again, that was 20 years ago or more since I touched them. But they are certainly not fashionable, and it does not appear that IBM has much interest in making them fashionable.
Then they have a research division that used to do great things. They may still be I just have not followed it much. I do know that they are investing a lot into research about Quantum chips. (or at least I think so)
DB/2 used to be a great database system. It may still be, but I have had no exposure to it in over a decade. It does not show up often in DBMS comparisons. But it is certainly not fashionable, and it does not appear that IBM has much interest in making it fashionable.
They have their cloud services But it is certainly not fashionable, and it does not appear that IBM has much interest in making it fashionable or ???? I know they are selling hybrid solutions for people with mainframe to run some things in the IBM cloud.
They have at least 4 operating systems. z/OS, AIX and RedHat (well that one is quite different) and whatever the iSeries run these days.
The must have a research park somewhere that invents new was to do licensing and making things even more expensive. Possibly some cooperating with Oracle :p
They have whatever their consulting arms is called now. I have been terribly disappointed with the consultants i have interacted with from there but I may have been unlucky.
They have RedHat and now (maybe) Hasicorp.
RedHat+Hasicorp goes into the cloud? + adds leverage to their consulting business.
What is the overall strategy though. They have so many different things but they dont seem to push them in a collective way into something new and wonderful.
When it comes to IBM z/series not being reliable though that is certainly not my experience. Do you know which generation this was? Were they quite old?
Were there repeated hardware failures?
Operating system? program crashes?
We all know what happens when the acquisition closes...
Death to anything IBM.
"Our incredible journey" ...
https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
In earlier years, many of them literally had those words in their final blog posts or emails to their users.
Now some of them seem to have got wise to the Tumblog above, so are changing their words, though not their meaning.
This is why we can't have nice things.
IBM is clearly running on fumes by now. Extending its life by pulling down more small companies with them only makes things worse for everyone.
Like all things, there is much more nuance than "big corporation bad."
You're arguing for a draconian regulatory response (it sounds like) to what should be a market issue.
In fact, strong (~free) capital markets in which acquisitions happen frequently allow for more efficient (~optimal) allocation of resources over the long run, even if any single acquisition may not be locally optimal
I argue that's an opinion.
I also argue that allowing for does not mean ensures.
I also argue that, in practice, acquisitions happening freely typically result in "more efficient" allocation of humans to the detriment of those humans. Also, "more efficient" allocation of resources often increases the cost of those resources to other humans consuming those resources.
So yes, it's a valid opinion but in practice the stated results are infrequently achieved and come with significant costs that aren't accounted for in a purely free market situation.