Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived Risk Around Spring and Broadcom

  • Some commenters say Bitnami’s move reinforces fears about Broadcom’s stewardship of other VMware assets, especially Spring.
  • In at least one enterprise, Spring Boot is now classified as a top risk, with mandated migration paths to alternatives (Quarkus, Helidon, Micronaut, Vert.x, Pekko, Jakarta EE).
  • Specific worries: license changes (e.g., BSL/closed source), key features moving behind paywalls, reduced staffing and slower security fixes, and dependence on a single vendor.
  • Others argue this is likely overreaction: Spring is widely used, forkable, and large players could sustain a community fork if needed.

What’s Changing With Bitnami and Helm Charts

  • Bitnami Helm charts and container definitions remain Apache-2 licensed on GitHub; the main change is discontinuing free distribution of most prebuilt images on Docker Hub.
  • All historical images are copied to bitnamilegacy, which stops receiving updates after Aug 28, 2025. The primary bitnami namespace will be cleaned up and limited to a small subset of “Secure Images” intended as a paid offering.
  • Some users find the communication confusing (timelines, which tags move when) and feel the docs under-emphasize non-paid migration paths.

User Impact, Migration Paths, and Alternatives

  • Many expect widespread breakage in CI/CD and running deployments when images disappear or move; manual updates or registry rewrites will be needed.
  • Recommended strategies:
    • Fork and collectively maintain the charts and container builds.
    • Use upstream vendor images (Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc.) or build from Bitnami’s Dockerfiles.
    • Mirror all production images to private registries to avoid future supply disruptions.
    • Discover other charts via Artifact Hub or project-specific repos.

Broadcom’s Strategy and Community Reaction

  • Strong sentiment that this is classic “enshittification”: extracting revenue from a previously free, developer-friendly asset and pushing enterprises toward a ~$5k/month “secure images” subscription.
  • Some note Broadcom’s broader pattern of buying mature products, monetizing locked-in enterprise users, and shedding the rest, though a few point out Broadcom (or its predecessor) also enabled successes like Raspberry Pi.

Helm, Kustomize, and Kubernetes Packaging Debate

  • The thread broadens into tooling: Helm’s user experience is divisive.
  • Criticisms: Go-text templating over YAML (whitespace-sensitive), brittle authoring, confusing schemas, and opaque failures.
  • Defenses: powerful composition, fast install experience, versioned release artifacts, rollback behavior, and “standard packaging” for vendors.
  • Alternatives discussed: Kustomize (especially with Flux/ArgoCD), Jsonnet/Tanka, CDK8s, Kapitan, Anemos, and plain YAML/JSON with GitOps.