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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 sh

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.

elephantum 1y ago
So, are they evil because they decided to stop sponsoring free network egress?
- systemswizard 1y ago
  Broadcom is deciding to host it on their own registry and bear the associated cost of doing so. Not sure what this has to do with sponsoring network egress
- buzer 1y ago
  The images are currently in Docker Hub. If $9/month (or $15, not 100% sure if $9 includes organizations) to keep those images available is too much for Bitnami I'm sure there are many organizations who wouldn't mind paying that bill for them (possibly even Docker Hub itself).
- runamok 1y ago
  Does said network egress cost $50k per user?
- MathiasPius 1y ago
  Others have already provided good answers. I wouldn't classify it as evil if all they did was to stop maintaining the images & charts, I recognise how much time, effort and money that takes. Companies and open source developers alike are free to say "We can no longer work on this". 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).
  - 7bit 1y ago
    that's an assumption, but Broadcom is most likely using open source software in all of their apps. So they do have a moral to also give something back. So just saying it's fair that they don't want to provide something for free anymore isn't really all that fair.
    - MathiasPius 1y ago
      Oh don't get me wrong, my claim is that they are not even clearing the absolute lowest bar when it comes to their stewardship of the Bitnami repositories: Do no harm.
    - luma 1y ago
      Expecting moral behavior from Hock Tan isn’t likely to pan out.
  - tetha 1y ago
    It's also entirely fine if they delete these images to me. But not with a week of time frame, as originally intended. 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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - 999900000999 1y ago
      If your doing anything serious you should have artifactory setup.
      - tetha 1y ago
        I agree. We do have mirrors setup, we do have observability into the images we use across the infrastructure. This has concluded we only have a minor issue with this move, wonderfully. 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.
MangoToupe 1y ago
This is much less exciting once you realize how evil broadcom is. Still, I suppose we all win in the short term.
martypitt 1y ago
I'm still waiting to see how Broadcom will monetize the Spring ecosystem - which is widely used in almost all large enterprises. Sadly, it feels like an inevitability at this point.
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  Good lord, I didn't know their tentacles were that deep. VMware sure had a lot of touch points.
- beachy 1y ago
  Holy shit, Broadcom owns Spring? Yikes.
- zdkaster 1y ago
  That's probability of 1.0, the missing question is when.
- ahoka 1y ago
  Yes, same here. Wonder how they will try to monetize it.
- uzername 1y ago
  My team is worried about that too. We've been a java and spring shop for years. We're looking at micronaut, it's similar enough. 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.
  - martypitt 1y ago
    My guess will be: - 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.
de6u99er 1y ago
I am certain most of Bitnami's engineers don't agree with those decisions.
- maxloh 1y ago
  I won't be so sure about that. Bitnami's installer was always proprietary software.
- TheCondor 1y ago
  Taking a bunch of projects and making containers and flexible helm charts for them is kind of an interesting model. It’s what Redhat and Canonical do with raw Linux packages; they charge for premium support and even patches or extended support. 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.
  - hadlock 1y ago
    Bitnami started out (2010? definitely since 2014) distributing virtual machine images (e.g. preconfigured LAMP stack server) and somehow inherited the official kubernetes helm repo several years ago, which even then, I think we all saw the writing on the wall.
q3k 1y ago
Broadcom has always been about pure evil (cough capitalism cough), you just haven't been affected by it before. Ask anyone who's worked with their hardware... So
nisegami 1y ago
Microsoft's existence means they're all fighting for 2nd place.
diftraku 1y ago
They're still technically Avago Technologies, just wearing the name of Broadcom after the acquisition in 2015-2016. Not sure if there's much of Broadcom left, beyond the name and what IP they had at the time which was not sold off, like they did with the IoT related IPs.

elephantum 1y ago

So, are they evil because they decided to stop sponsoring free network egress?

systemswizard 1y ago
Broadcom is deciding to host it on their own registry and bear the associated cost of doing so. Not sure what this has to do with sponsoring network egress
buzer 1y ago
The images are currently in Docker Hub. If $9/month (or $15, not 100% sure if $9 includes organizations) to keep those images available is too much for Bitnami I'm sure there are many organizations who wouldn't mind paying that bill for them (possibly even Docker Hub itself).
runamok 1y ago
Does said network egress cost $50k per user?
MathiasPius 1y ago
Others have already provided good answers. I wouldn't classify it as evil if all they did was to stop maintaining the images & charts, I recognise how much time, effort and money that takes. Companies and open source developers alike are free to say "We can no longer work on this". 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).
- 7bit 1y ago
  that's an assumption, but Broadcom is most likely using open source software in all of their apps. So they do have a moral to also give something back. So just saying it's fair that they don't want to provide something for free anymore isn't really all that fair.
  - MathiasPius 1y ago
    Oh don't get me wrong, my claim is that they are not even clearing the absolute lowest bar when it comes to their stewardship of the Bitnami repositories: Do no harm.
  - luma 1y ago
    Expecting moral behavior from Hock Tan isn’t likely to pan out.
- tetha 1y ago
  It's also entirely fine if they delete these images to me. But not with a week of time frame, as originally intended. 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - 999900000999 1y ago
    If your doing anything serious you should have artifactory setup.
    - tetha 1y ago
      I agree. We do have mirrors setup, we do have observability into the images we use across the infrastructure. This has concluded we only have a minor issue with this move, wonderfully. 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.

MangoToupe 1y ago

This is much less exciting once you realize how evil broadcom is. Still, I suppose we all win in the short term.

martypitt 1y ago

I'm still waiting to see how Broadcom will monetize the Spring ecosystem - which is widely used in almost all large enterprises. Sadly, it feels like an inevitability at this point.

arcanemachiner 1y ago
Good lord, I didn't know their tentacles were that deep. VMware sure had a lot of touch points.
beachy 1y ago
Holy shit, Broadcom owns Spring? Yikes.
zdkaster 1y ago
That's probability of 1.0, the missing question is when.
ahoka 1y ago
Yes, same here. Wonder how they will try to monetize it.
uzername 1y ago
My team is worried about that too. We've been a java and spring shop for years. We're looking at micronaut, it's similar enough. 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.
- martypitt 1y ago
  My guess will be: - 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.

de6u99er 1y ago

I am certain most of Bitnami's engineers don't agree with those decisions.

maxloh 1y ago
I won't be so sure about that. Bitnami's installer was always proprietary software.
TheCondor 1y ago
Taking a bunch of projects and making containers and flexible helm charts for them is kind of an interesting model. It’s what Redhat and Canonical do with raw Linux packages; they charge for premium support and even patches or extended support. 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.
- hadlock 1y ago
  Bitnami started out (2010? definitely since 2014) distributing virtual machine images (e.g. preconfigured LAMP stack server) and somehow inherited the official kubernetes helm repo several years ago, which even then, I think we all saw the writing on the wall.

q3k 1y ago

Broadcom has always been about pure evil (cough capitalism cough), you just haven't been affected by it before. Ask anyone who's worked with their hardware... So

nisegami 1y ago

Microsoft's existence means they're all fighting for 2nd place.

diftraku 1y ago

They're still technically Avago Technologies, just wearing the name of Broadcom after the acquisition in 2015-2016. Not sure if there's much of Broadcom left, beyond the name and what IP they had at the time which was not sold off, like they did with the IoT related IPs.