My guess is it'll be IBM.<p>Based upon some research into numbers...<p>They'll absorb the talent. Expand IBMs offering of Vault-ish product while basically reselling Vault as a line item addition to their existing line items.<p>Less pain for IBM from license drama and the selling of open source Vault with an IBM tweak to a MUCH larger user base with zero sales expense.<p>IBM gets all Vault talent
Hashi gets massive market without sales<p>Hashi is $800MM revenue because of 80% sales and marketing.
Out of curiosity, and afaik HashiCorp is not one, how do sales of US-style benefit corporations [0] go?<p>It seems like irrevocable benefits enumerated in corporate bylaws + predecided public-friendly liquidation procedure (i.e. source code / copyright / trademark release) would help fight profit maximization at the expense of product quality.<p>HashiCorp's financials don't look terrible, so I'm assuming this sale is more about individual holders cashing out?<p>[0] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation</a>
Is there any dev friendly company that buys companies like this?<p>Oracle would make it suck more.<p>Microsoft, Amazon, or Google would make it less portable and do they buy infrastructure projects like this?<p>Would Cisco maybe consider this infrastructure in all their customers stacks?<p>Or Facebook could buy as a vanity project to just get mindspace with developers?
Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale (bloomberg.com)<p>65 points by MajimasEyepatch 1 day ago | 49 comments<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39721381">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39721381</a>
I always thought Hashi's technologies would lose their lustres soon. My previous company used to use Terraform and Nomad. They are like Graphite 10 years ago: darling of the open source community, good for small companies, but eventually becoming a productivity nightmare. There are just so many bizarre decisions and the accidental complexity of Hashi's family bucket is just through the roof. The one that I hate most is its embedding of Jinja template to inject system configurations. I mean why in the world would someone separate the service configuration from a service itself and force engineers to take care of service configurations in a separate places while learning so many irrelevant details: Terraform, Jinja, string escaping, embedded language, integration with the deployment environment, and the official docs do not help that much. They seem contain everything, but it's just so hard to connect the dots.
Hashicorp gave away basically everything valuable they had, and charges extortionate prices for the few features they've paywalled. Only way they're going to survive is by becoming a feature of some bigger cloud offering.<p>We've been leaning into Terraform-based Crossplane providers recently and the out of the box experience is so much better than using terraform cloud once you get crossplane set up, I can't imagine ever going back to vanilla terraform pipelines, and certainly not paying for terraform cloud.
In case one wants to switch from Hashicorp to alternatives that are similar enough or forks, what would that stack be?<p>Hashiternative stack:<p>- vault -> openbao (fork)<p>- terraform -> opentofu (fork)<p>- consul -> ?<p>- nomad -> slurm + something that runs/orchestrates windows jobs?<p>- hcl -> dhall + nix?
So far I haven't seen any fork or alternative to Nomad emerge.<p>What is particularly worrisome when you need something lightweight and to support non containerized services...
Here is a free tip to fix terraform business model (no MBA required):
- Terraform is one of the most valuable tools for IaC - it's all free and it shouldn't - it is not a consumer product, it is not running ads and 99% of the users are business users with money.
- Keep Terraform SDK free and open source, close source plugins, charge per resource.
- Invest much more into Core and plugins.<p>all forks are doomed with the same destiny, business model is not sustainable with negative margin - as long as you have such a generous free tier and storage can run on S3 the price you can ask for a managed version is incredibly low.<p>You welcome :)