People's beef here with IBM is they don't make shiny phones and laptops and don't create hip jobs where you're paid 500k+ to "change the world" by selling ads or making the 69th messaging app.

They just focus on tried and tested boring SW that big businesses find useful and that's not popular on HN which is more startup and disruption focused.

This is unnecessarily dismissive.

While Hashicorp hasn’t been exciting for a while, I fail to see how an acquisition from IBM will invigorate excitement, much less even a neutral reaction from many developers.

Hashicorp had a huge hand in defining and popularizing the modern DevOps procedures we now declare as best practices. That’s a torch to hold that would be very difficult for a business like IBM.

Perhaps I missed some things but the core of Ansible feels like it’s continuing it’s path to be much less of a priority over the paid value-adds. I can’t help but to think the core of Hashicorp’s products will go down this path, hence my pessimism.

Do you mean Terraform, not Ansible?

IBM owns Ansible, redserk is saying Terraform will go a similar route. Although I don't see what they mean by core being lower priority than paid. The paid features are all available for free via AWX, which is the open source upstream of the paid product AAP.

Red Hat's business model is "Hellware"--the open source versions are designed to be incredibly difficult to install/manage/upgrade or without any kind of stability that you're forced to pay for their versions.

> This is unnecessarily dismissive.

No, it is not. HN has both a "greybeard" audience that will cheer in "Go boring tech" posts and an "hipster" audience that is heavily start-up and disruption focused as GP was saying. When talking about IBM and acquisitions or similar topics, it's usually the second audience that speaks more.

That doesn't mean that some acquisition really kill the product, but you don't need to be as big and old as IBM to do that.

There are a number of valid criticisms about IBM

My beef with IBM as someone who worked for a company they acquired is that they would interfere with active deals that I was working on, force us to stand down while IBM tried to sell some other bullshit, then finally “allow us” to follow up with the customer once it’s too late, and the customer decided to move on to something else. Repeatedly.

Fuck IBM.

You have obviously never been the victim of IBMs consulting arm. I caution anyone against buying anything IBM now. Absolute nightmare to work with.

or just work anywhere within IBM

IBM’s consulting arm was finally so radioactive that they spun it out into a new company (Kyndryl). What I’ve seen is that customers still have a low opinion of the new company and they continue to refer to it as IBM.

Kyndryl is IBM??

Yes and you wouldn't believe how bad they are. We had multiple incidents where colleagues had to explain basic stuff to them and hold their hands. I was in a couple of calls with their engineers and those instantly reduced my impostorship syndrome.

I worked for several years with IBM solutions and the like, I thought they ended up opening near shore centers in Europe to "sell" "local" ressources but it was just detached Indian employees from upper cast billed more than us as they were IBM experts.

Nah dude. Their business internal is a dinosaur both in girth and age. If they estimate 2 years for you, put away budget for 10. And all you’re gonna get is excuses and blame.

IBM repeatedly cleaning house of anyone approaching (let alone in or even rarely beyond) middle age is abhorrent.

It's funny to characterise people's beef with IBM as that they're boring, old, and stale when IBM are apparently allergic to anyone over 40.

Also their consultants have been some of the most weaponised incompetence laden, rude, and entitled idiots I've ever had the sincere displeasure to deal with.

IBM are an embarrassment to their own legacy imo.

Yeah I mean I feel you but imo this is just what the world is. Ive been fucked over many times in my career…people just have to learn to fuck back.

I was more so commenting on the HN hate for the technology/products aspect. IBM has accomplished FAR more than hashicorp and everyone here acts like they were gods gift to software.

IBM took away the ability of CentOS to be a free and trivial to swap-in alternative to the paid product RedHat Enterprise. That RedHat was already in financial trouble due to self-cannibalizing their own paid product is irrelevant; emotionally, “IBM” – not “RedHat” – made the decision to stop charging $0 for their custom enterprise patchsets and release trains, and so IBM will always be the focus of community ire about RedHat’s acquisition.

I expect, like RedHat, that the Hashicorp acquisition will result in a lot of startups that do not need enterprise-grade products shifting away from “anything Hashicorp offers that needs to charge money for Hashicorp to stay revenue-positive” and towards “any and all free alternatives that lower the opex of a business”, along with derogatory comments about IBM predictably assigning a non-$0 price for Hashicorp’s future work output.

* Red Hat wasn't ever "in financial trouble" -- their revenue line was up-and-to-the-right for a ridiculous number of consecutive quarters. Even when they missed overall earnings estimates, it was rarely by much and they still usually beat EPS estimates for the quarter.

* IBM had little to do with Red Hat's maneuvers around CentOS (I worked at Red Hat for several years and still have friends there, and nothing anybody there said publicly about CentOS in 2020 or 2023 was materially different from things people there were saying about it internally in 2012). Some people have tried to blame IBM for a general culture shift but as far as I've seen, every bit of the CentOS debacle was laid squarely at the feet of Red Hat staff by most in this industry -- as it should have been, since most of those involved were employed there well before IBM bought the company.

IBM's reputation as an aging dinosaur was well-earned long before it bought Red Hat, and continues to be earned outside it. That earned reputation was why they bought RHT in the first place: IBM Cloud market share was (and still is) declining and they wanted a jumpstart in both revenue and engineering credibility from OpenShift in particular.

IBM was taken over by bean counters years ago. There were researchers and others that would literally skip being in or find a way to avoid bean counters when they walked through IBM Research Labs (like Almaden Research Center) years ago (heard from multiple people years back that were working on contracts/etc there - mainly academics).

Also, IBM has been extremely ageist in their "layoff" policies. They also have declined in quality by outsourcing to low cost/low skill areas.

I knew a guy who was laid off from IBM specifically for being older, which came out years later as part of the class action lawsuit...

There is a former column that was under multiple writers (same name), that did a great expose on IBM and age discrimination, but I don't want to give said column their due since the columnist had other issues.

If it's really their due, you should give it to them. This value system where you have to punish people if they don't have the "right" views needs to stop. Would you like someone to do that to you? If they did good work, it doesn't get infected by whatever "issues" they had.

Like Bourbaki? Or they all happened to share a name?

Here is one such article - https://www.cringely.com/2016/04/06/is-ibm-guilty-of-age-dis...

I never worked there, but I worked at a security company that hired a bunch of ex-IBM X-Force security guys, and they hated IBM with a passion.

Self selection, to be sure, but their beefs were mostly about the crushing bureaucracy that was imposed on what was supposed to be a nimble type domain; (network) security is, after all, mostly leapfrog with the black hats.

I just got to spin down a bunch of infra that was originally in Softlayer, which IBM acquired years ago. IBM were terrible to work with, they frequently crashed services by evacuating VMs from hosts and then not powering them back up, and only notifying us long after our own monitoring detected it. Won't miss that.

IBM has always been a punching bag.

I had been wondering who would buy HCP, I sort of figured it was either going to be AWS, Google, or Azure and then I figured the other vendor were going to have support removed (maybe gradually, maybe not.)

It could have been worse: It could have been Oracle.

One of the reasons I left when I did was that it was starting to get really obvious that an acquisition was likely and I desperately did not want my work e-mail address to end in oracle.com.

Or Broadcom...

It was special when Mitchell Hashimoto was still at the helm.

Watson

IBM is to software as Boeing is to planes.

I will not be taking questions ;-)

I have the "honor" of getting to use IBM $PRODUCT at $COMPANY.

- it uses some form of consensus algorithm between all nodes that somehow manages to randomly get the whole cluster into a non working state by simply existing, requiring manual reboots

- Patches randomly introduce new features, often times with breaking changes to current behaviour

- Patches tend to break random different things and even the patches for those patches often don't work

- For some reason the process how to apply updates randomly changes between every couple of patches, making automation all but impossible

- the support doesn't know how $PRODUCT works, which leads to us explaining to them how it actually does things

- It is ridiculously expensive, both in hardware and licensing costs

All of this has been going on for years without any signs of improvement for now, to the point that $COMPANY now avoids IBM if at all possible

You talk about beef, look at what they did with a project for Canadian Government. They are not the same IBM they were 50 years ago. Now they are a consulting firm and a shitty one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15303555

So which of the other potential buyers of HCP is the magical non-shitty $BIGCORP you would’ve preferred?

I would have like Microsoft to buy it.

Look at what they did with the Phoenix project for Canadian Government. They are not the same IBM they were 50 years ago. Now they are a consulting firm that employ cheap labor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15303555

Look at what they did with the Phoenix project for Canadian Government. They are not the same IBM they were 50 years ago. Now they are a consulting firm.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15303555