Between the VMware licensing changes and this, it looks like Broadcom is making a serious play at dethroning Oracle as the most evil software vendor.
It's a shame that competition for this position has been ramping up lately.
It's a shame that competition for this position has been ramping up lately.
Sadly, it feels like an inevitability at this point.
When I had someone from another team take a look at broadcom and what they could do to spring, they said the licenses are permissive, it will be fine. Likely not that simple.
- Shorter support windows, with longer support available for purchase (VMWare actually introduced this, but Broadcom can weaponize it)
- Then Enterprise Spring, which has additional features
- Then some other license shenaningans.
Hazelcast recently made the move where CVE security updates are only released into the OSS ecosystem quarterly - whereas the enterprise model gets them as soon as they're ready. In OSS, you have to rebuild and patch yourself.
That's a special kind of evil, which has Broadcom DNA all over it.
I was going through one of my clusters, I have two bitnami uses and they are both ‘building blocks’ I use Trino, which uses a metastore which uses postgresql and then some other package uses redis. It seems like both postgresql and redis could/would have containers and charts to install their stuff, where it breaks is the postgresql guys probably want to support “current” and not 4 major releases back, which is kind of normal to see in the wild.
It is kind of an interesting model, I’d love it if rancher or openshift or someone started to seriously compete. Shipping a Kubernetes in a box is nice but if they started packaging up the building blocks, that’s huge too.
The evil part is in outright breaking people's systems, in violation of the implicit agreement established by having something be public in the first place.
I know Broadcom inherited Bitnami as part of an acquisition and legally have no obligation to do anything, but ethically (which is why they are evil, not necessarily criminal) they absolutely have a duty to minimise the damage, which is 100% within their power & budget as others have pointed out.
And this is before you even consider all the work unpaid contributors have put into Bitnami over the years (myself included).
And sure, we can go ahead and discuss how this being free incurs no SLAs or guarantees. That's correct, but does not mean that such a short time frame is both rude and not a high quality of offering a service. If I look at how long it would take us to cancel a customer contract and off-board those...
And apparently it costs $9 to host this for another month? Sheesh.
But, just butting users with "Just do this good practice" or "Just do this NOW" still is an uphill battle and will usually not cause the best effect with users. We're currently doing this while moving our 2-3 artifactories into one. If we just shut this stuff off because "You should have more control with your builds", there'd be a riot.
And sure, some people will still fail the migration no matter what. But such time frames are still punishing any but the most professional companies.
That's all in all the work I consider a good operations team to do. Make a stink, provide a migration path, be noticeable, and push people off of the old stuff. Just breaking things because "you should have" is burning trust by the mile.
Free software. Free docker images/registries.
Then when a company is like "Hey, um we need to make money", every body gets upset.
We need a more substainable way forward. I can't tell you what that looks like though.
The Path to Outrage is actually:
1. Launch HN with MPL licensing, "we <3 Open Source!11"
2. (a few moments later) Onoz, engineers cost money and that sweet VC juice dries up
3. echo BuSL > LICENSE; git commit -am"License update"; blog about "safeguarding our customers" or whatever
4. shocked pikachu face when users, who starting using the open source product, and maybe even contributed bug fixes or suggestions on how to make the community product better, lose their minds about having the rug pulled out from under them
Contrast this with:
1. Launch HN, asking for money to pay for the product
2. Potential customers will evaluate if the product adds enough value for the money requested
There is no step 3 containing outrage because everyone was on the same page from the beginning
In this case, it's a lot more nefarious. My boss has a list of companies Broadcom has literally sucked dry for money regardless if the company will make it 2 more years. Pretty much everything maintained by VMWare Tanzu and VMWare has to be considered a business risk at this point.
And I maintain, I'm not even mad that the free images go away. I'm saying it's unprofessional and rude how they are being removed. Which however isn't surprising with Broadcom per the last point.
And sure, the answer is to do it all in-house. But the industry has saved a lot of manpower and made tremendous progress by not doing that and sharing effort for a long time.
Eventually the rug needs to be pulled.
A non profit foundation is probably closer to what you want
Something, something, sticking your hand in a lawnmower and expecting it not to be cut off.
Broadcom is second only to Oracle.