Comment by _cenw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _cenw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on.

I find that to be a pretty dishonest business model. I don't have any Bitnami images to replace, but I know a lot of people who do without ever having made that choice - and their bosses aren't going to pay Broadcom for the most part either. So you end up with overworked developers that now hate Broadcom and/or a whole lot of deployments that just break or never get updated. The number of people going "I can just switch over to the archive image, whatever" on the K8s subreddit alone is concerning.

The Bitnami images and helm charts are just convenient repackaging of things that are already freely (gratis) available. There's nothing stopping you from still deploying Kafka or Redis, etc. into your k8s cluster without using the Bitnami helm chart or building your own charts.

I think that's the point of above of "now you have to do your job" There's an evaluation that takes place when choosing to use something as an engineer, and the writing should have been on the wall the moment that Broadcom bought Bitrock to start planning to reduce dependency on those things.

> What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on.

You skipped the part where you bankrupt your competition in the space who can't afford to hemorrhage cash they don't have like a VC-backed startup can, hoover up all the customers, then charge more than the old guard industry did in the first damn place for a worse version of the same service, while also paradoxically paying any workers needed to provide said service even less than they were making before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com