IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Deal terms and valuation

  • IBM buying HashiCorp for $6.4B, $35/share, ~40–43% premium to the prior close but below 52‑week high.
  • Some see it as “overpriced”; others note 10–12x revenue is normal or even low for SaaS in this market.
  • Comparisons made to IBM’s Red Hat deal (larger premium) and HashiCorp’s much higher IPO valuation; seen as a comedown from the IPO peak.

Terraform, licensing, and OpenTofu

  • Terraform’s move from MPL to Business Source License is widely linked to this outcome; several see the acquisition as retroactively explaining the change.
  • Concern that BUSL blocks competitors from offering “Terraform as a service,” driving forks.
  • OpenTofu (Linux Foundation) is the main Terraform fork; some suggest IBM could revert licensing to regain community contributions, others are skeptical.
  • Discussion of potential IBM legal pressure on forks and ongoing HashiCorp–OpenTofu code disputes; details of that dispute are contested and partly unclear.

Vault, Nomad, Consul, and other products

  • Heavy worry about Vault and Nomad being de‑prioritized or “run into the ground.”
  • Some praise Vault and Nomad as enabling small teams to run serious infra; others say cloud‑native secrets managers are simpler if you’re single‑cloud.
  • Nomad is seen as filling a gap between Docker Compose and Kubernetes; fear that no big player has incentive to invest, but belief a community fork could emerge.

IBM’s track record and Red Hat/CentOS

  • Strong skepticism about IBM as a steward: bureaucracy, ageism, weak consulting quality, and products that are hard to manage and expensive.
  • Others push back: IBM still makes >$60B/year, runs critical infra for banks, airlines, governments, and has not, according to some insiders, directly “killed” CentOS.
  • Red Hat’s experience post‑acquisition is debated: some say day‑to‑day remains OK, others say sales and community moves (CentOS changes, Ansible focus) show deterioration.

Developer and customer reactions

  • Many plan or consider migrations: Terraform → OpenTofu, Vault → alternatives (e.g., cloud secrets managers, OpenBao, other OSS tools).
  • Terraform Cloud is widely criticized as slow and overpriced; several already use S3/Dynamo or competing SaaS instead.
  • Mixed feelings: respect for HashiCorp’s technical impact and tools (Vagrant, Terraform, Vault, etc.), but belief that the company had already “sold out” or lost its early engineering culture before IBM.