IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

I joined HashiCorp in 2016 to work on Nomad and have been on the product ever since. Definitely a lot of feelings today. When I joined HashiCorp was maybe 50 people. Armon Dadgar personally onboarded us one at a time, and showed me how to use the coffee maker (remember to wash your own dishes!). There have been a lot of ups (IPO) and downs (BUSL), but the Nomad team and users have been the best I&#x27;ve ever gotten to work with.<p>I&#x27;ve only ever worked at startups before, but HashiCorp itself left that category when it IPO&#x27;d. Each phase is definitely different, but then again I don&#x27;t want go back to roadmapping on a ridiculously small whiteboard in a terrible sub-leased office and building release binaries on my laptop. That was fun once, but I&#x27;m ready for a new phase in my own life. I&#x27;ve heard the horror stories of being acquired by IBM, but I&#x27;ve also heard from people who have reveled in the resources and opportunities. I&#x27;m hoping for the best for Nomad, our users, and our team. I&#x27;d like to think there&#x27;s room in the world for multiple schedulers, and if not, it won&#x27;t be for lack of trying.

Hashicorp&#x27;s stuff always struck me as pretty hacky with awkward design decisions. For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone.<p>Then they did the license change, which didn&#x27;t reflect well on them.<p>Now it&#x27;s being sold to IBM, which is essentially a consulting company trying to pivot to mostly undifferentiated software offerings. So I guess Hashicorp is basically over.<p>I suspect the various forks will be used for a while.

Sorry HashiCorp, been there and got the Tee-shirt (pink) :)<p>Actually for me, the company I was at that IBM purchased was on the verge of folding, so in that case, IBM saved our jobs and I was there for many years.

Years before &#x27;93-&#x27;96 when I worked at Kaleida [1], a joint venture of Apple and IBM, alongside Taligent [2] their AIM Alliance [3] sister company, I laughed at the old joke:<p>Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?<p>A: IBM.<p>But then the joke was on me when I finally worked for a company owned by Apple and IBM at the same time, and experienced it first hand!<p>I gave Lou Gerstner a DreamScape [4] demo involving an animated disembodied spinning bouncing eyeball, who commented &quot;That&#x27;s a bit too right-brained for me.&quot; I replied &quot;Oh no, I should have used the other eyeball!&quot;<p>Later when Sun was shopping itself around, there were rumors that IBM might buy it, so the joke would still apply to them, but it would have been a more dignified death than Oracle ending up lawnmowering [5] Sun, sigh.<p>Now that Apple&#x27;s 15 times bigger than IBM, I bet the joke still applies, giving Apple a great reason NOT to merge with IBM.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kaleida_Labs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kaleida_Labs</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Taligent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Taligent</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AIM_alliance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AIM_alliance</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&amp;t=323s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&amp;t=323s</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5170246">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5170246</a>

As it happened with the other startups that were acquired by IBM, this too shall pass through the digestion system of the dinosaur and ejected out as a dump. Hashicorp products are showing the signs of a legacy thing already. IBM is the nursing home for these sort of aging stuff.<p>I&#x27;m a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.

One of those places (like HP, Oracle and Broadcom, and also CA back in the day) where once good companies go to die.

People who stayed at IBM because they could not afford going anywhere else.<p>People who worked at companies acquired by IBM and could not afford going anywhere else.<p>A mixture of both will be involved from now on in decision making regarding your platform formation core products.

Condolences, Hashicorp folks. Been there.

Enjoy switching to Lotus Notes.

Investors at IPO lost quite a bit of money...

&gt; By 2028, it is projected that generative AI will lead to the creation of 1 billion new cloud-native applications.<p>lmfao what the fuck? The source they reference: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.idc.com&#x2F;getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.idc.com&#x2F;getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724</a><p>These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.<p>You know it&#x27;s bad when the only people making money on this crap are management consultants.<p>Thinking back to 2014 using vagrant to develop services locally on my laptop I never would have imagined them getting swallowed up by big blue as some bizarre &quot;AI&quot; play. Shit is getting real weird around here.

All these redhatters talking like centos isnt dead. Like wtf, the Kool aid must taste good.

In some ways to me it feels like a turning point for the GFC&#x2F;ZIRP thru COVID era of tech companies with no path to profit.<p>After the haze of the LLM bubble passes, I hope startups have an exit strategy other than &quot;we&#x27;ll just get 0.01% of users to pay 6+ figures for support&quot; or &quot;ads&quot;.<p>Good tech deserves a good business model such that it can endure for the long term.

It&#x27;s been good using hashicorp tools, now IBM is going to run them to the ground. I need to look into the fork of tf now.

IBM is pushing for restauring software patents in the US (and elsewhere), not a friend of software freedom.

&quot;HashiCorp&#x27;s capabilities drive significant synergies across multiple strategic growth areas for IBM, including Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and Consulting&quot;<p>this sounds like corporate AI slop

I learned many things at HashiCorp but none as important as choosing ISOs over RSUs when given the chance. Thank you for the gains $HCP.<p>I met some great people along the way that I&#x27;m glad to have gotten the opportunity to work with. Godspeed all!

Hashicorp blog post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hashicorp.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;hashicorp-officially-joins-the-ibm-family" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hashicorp.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;hashicorp-officially-joins...</a>

Do any Opentofu cloud providers (like spacelift) offer a managed migration tool to their cloud and opentofu from TFE or TFC?<p>(Asking for a friend).

The consolidation of power and IP into just several tech companies is worrying to me. Having the misfortune of working at IBM for just a few months, IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. Maybe Bloodmoar will buy up the rest and squeeze whatever remaining profit from acquisition.<p>If given the chance, just take the exit rather than trying to integrate into IBM.

Kinda off topic. How is Red Hat doing after being acquired? (Serious question)

Is this even the same company that created Terraform? HashiCorp&#x27;s trajectory has been baffling...

IBM has been on a shopping spree of garbage companies. Which tools are next?

Sad!

Good bye Terraform :joy:

No wonder Vault is now trying to get me to pay $50 a month to store more than 25 secrets. Enshittifucation has already begun.

I love it when IBM tries to stay relevant!

Will terraform still work for GCP and AWS?

Well, darn.

Sad to see this, but I will again shill for HashiCorp&#x27;s Nomad as a better alternative to Kubernetes.

I was really hoping this wouldn&#x27;t happen given one org (IBM) effectively controls both Terraform and Ansible.<p>Salt and Puppet both don&#x27;t seem in a great place.<p>System Initiative is just AWS still, yeah?<p>Welp.

So, what is the practical TL;DR for everyone who isn&#x27;t neither an employee nor investor? Hashicorp kinda made a lot of significant stuff, but that stuff is mostly FOSS and the commercial product is very niche. I am kinda surprised IBM even bought it, because it isn&#x27;t very clear to me, how commercializeable this stuff is. So what does it mean? Will IBM most likely kill some FOSS products? Is this even possible? Were, say, terraform or nomad developed mostly by internal devs, or is there a solid enough community already to keep up with development or simply fork the tool if things go south?