Comment by asmor
6 months ago
> However, in order to sustain and support the dedicated team of engineers who maintain and build new charts and images, a subscription will be required if an organization needs the images and charts built and hosted in an OCI registry for them.
This is such a naive take. Bitnami images were a sign of goodwill, a foot in the door at places were the hardened images were actually needed. They just couldn't compete with the better options on the market. This isn't a way to fix it, it's extortion. This is the same thing Terraform Cloud did, and I don't think that product is doing so hot.
> Essentially, Bitnami has been the Jenkins of the internet for many years, but this has become unsustainable.
It's other people's software, so it's very rich of Bitnami to accuse anyone of freeloading when their only contribution is adding config options to software that maybe corresponds to a level 2 on the OperatorFramework capability scale[1] - usually more of a 1.
> It's other people's software, so it's very rich of Bitnami to accuse anyone of freeloading when their only contribution is adding config options to software
I'm not going to defend a corporation but this sentence feels very entitled. They were providing it for free, you could use it. They are not going to provide it for free anymore, you migrate to something else or self-maintain it and say "thank you for the base work you did I can use now"
Aye, It's a bit like saying you can't sell your code, because you wrote it in someone elses software.
Writing a decent Dockerfile isn't hard, and keeping it maintained and working with new versions is still work and it's past the wheelhouse of very many people. It's entirely reasonable to want paid for that effort.
That said, it's not work I personally value enough to put my hand in my pocket, and that's a fair take too.
When a project is abandoned, when updates are slow, when features people want are not being released, when tracking upstream dependency updates are delayed, sure, you are not entitled to anything and I’ll be the first one to say get off your butt and contribute. In the other hand when you engage with the community for years under an OSS/free context then once the community has invested in your project, learning it, creating learning resources for it, integrating it into their own projects, and you never communicated your intention to “wait until it gets big then then pull the rug” it feels like a disingenuous bait and switch. The reason it feels that way is because it is a disingenuous bait and switch. This is even more so the case when you built your project on top of other projects.
I have no problem using a paid product or service or paying for support on a OSS product, but will never pay one of these bait and switch scams a dime, no matter how much engineering effort it takes.
I understand the sentiment and where it comes from, and I'm not saying it's a good decision from Broadcom (I think it is a bad one indeed!). But still, this risk is part of the game. Even if it was full opensource and with a broad community, it was still a single vendor, not even a non-profit umbrella like the Apache or Linux Foundation. So, the risk of trusting a single vendor was there.
The good thing of it being opensource is that someone else (company, community, foundation or whatever) can step in, fork it, and maintain it from now on, unlike what happens with proprietary software or SaaS.
It’s Broadcom. Don’t use anything from them unless you can’t avoid it.
Same applies to Oracle.
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I think it's perfectly fair for them to say "we're not doing this any more". The sketchy part is deleting the public registry at docker.io/bitnami rather than just no longer updating it. Why can't docker.io/bitnami become the 'legacy' registry, receive no future updates, so at least folks who don't hear this news won't have pulls suddenly fail?
edit: like if I have a package on NPM and I want to stop offering it, I think it's shitty to just delete it. That breaks builds.
Vendor lock-in is a thing. Switching costs are a thing. They know this. That's the whole business model. They're expecting that the cost of switching to outweigh the cost of the subscription.
I get that this business model is fashionable amongst wannabe rent-seekers, but it's still antisocial and should be shunned.
Evaluating the risks of vendor lock-in is a buyer's task, unless it is a protected market or there is a monopoly abuse involved.
In this case, nobody forced (generic) you to use Bitnami's Docker images, you probably just thought "how convenient, always updated and easy to pull, one less thing to worry about". Which is fine, but it's always a bet on what will happen in the future.
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This is not rent-seeking: Rent-seeking is leveraging your position to garner economic rents, like putting a toll gate across a highway in which the only value received for the toll is the opening of the gate.
Rent-seeking would be Broadcom saying that you must run a Bitnami image in CloudFoundry or pay a penalty for not doing so. They are in fact doing some work here. We may disagree on whether or not they're being compensated fairly for that work, but that disagreement doesn't turn this into "rent-seeking"
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> it's extortion
That's a wild take for "somebody provided something for free but decided they don't want to anymore".
Sucks for you, looks like you have to do your job yourself now.
Reminds me of a joke, where there was a beggar sitting on a street next to a certain office, and one man has been giving him a coin every time he went to work or was going home. That continued for a while, until one day the man says to the beggar - "you know, I've been giving you a coin twice a day for a while now, but now I am getting married, it's an expensive thing so I can't give as much anymore, I only will be giving you a coin once a day from now on". And the beggar cries out: "Look at this putz, he's getting married and now I have to feed his whole family!"
This scenario is more like if the man tipped you when you never needed it, you used the money to buy something, and then he forced you to work for it. You never would have spent the tipped money if they didn't give it to you, and the fact they did with the intention of asking for it back is annoying.
In this bitnami case, I would have just built these images myself but they offered public images accessible from dockerhub. There's 0 reason to change the existing registry besides intentionally breaking builds. The security narrative they try to spin about why they will delete the legacy registry is also laughable. As if the consumers of those images are incapable of assessing the risk of using legacy images themselves.
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What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on.
I find that to be a pretty dishonest business model. I don't have any Bitnami images to replace, but I know a lot of people who do without ever having made that choice - and their bosses aren't going to pay Broadcom for the most part either. So you end up with overworked developers that now hate Broadcom and/or a whole lot of deployments that just break or never get updated. The number of people going "I can just switch over to the archive image, whatever" on the K8s subreddit alone is concerning.
The Bitnami images and helm charts are just convenient repackaging of things that are already freely (gratis) available. There's nothing stopping you from still deploying Kafka or Redis, etc. into your k8s cluster without using the Bitnami helm chart or building your own charts.
I think that's the point of above of "now you have to do your job" There's an evaluation that takes place when choosing to use something as an engineer, and the writing should have been on the wall the moment that Broadcom bought Bitrock to start planning to reduce dependency on those things.
> What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on.
You skipped the part where you bankrupt your competition in the space who can't afford to hemorrhage cash they don't have like a VC-backed startup can, hoover up all the customers, then charge more than the old guard industry did in the first damn place for a worse version of the same service, while also paradoxically paying any workers needed to provide said service even less than they were making before.
>This is such a naive take. Bitnami images were a sign of goodwill, a foot in the door at places were the hardened images were actually needed. They just couldn't compete with the better options on the market. This isn't a way to fix it, it's extortion. This is the same thing Terraform Cloud did, and I don't think that product is doing so hot.
You seem to be confused about who Broadcom is and how they operate. "Long term health" isn't a thing for them. They buy products that are embedded deeply in the fortune 500, cut 90% of the staff, and increase licensing and support 2-100x. They do not care if you are upset. They do not care if you're going to "find something else". They don't care if you build an entire campaign to decry what they're doing.
They know the F500 cannot easily remove them, and that they will have at minimum 5 years to print cash on their service contracts. Sure, some of those F500s will sue them and try to stop the extortion via legal means, but they know that they'll either win, or at worst still be allowed to jack up prices even if a court rules it's not their original egregious asking price.
Building Infrastructure company is challenging in 2025. Previously, you would prioritize traction among developers over focusing on revenue.
But that does not work in 2025. You are expected to make money from the get-go and are left with only enterprise customers and boy, that category is hard, as everyone is competing for that slice.
> Previously, you would prioritize traction among developers over focusing on revenue.
A.k.a. using open source as a marketing tactic to lure in customers, only to do a rug pull once the business gains enough momentum.
> But that does not work in 2025.
Good. It is an insidious practice. There are very few projects that actually do this properly without turning their backs on the users who made their products popular in the first place.
> You are expected to make money from the get-go and are left with only enterprise customers and boy, that category is hard, as everyone is competing for that slice.
The strategy of delivering valuable products that benefit users without exploiting them has always existed. The thing is that many companies choose the greedy and user hostile path, instead of running a sustainable business that delivers value to humanity and not just to shareholders, which is much more difficult. So I have no sympathy towards these companies.
The problem I think is that all the easy infrastructure problems have been solved and the market is crowded with those solutions. Solving the hard problems is probably where you could have a viable business but I don't really see that many companies trying to solve those:
* Making mono-repos work for large companies.
* Mixed language builds are still a ci/cd unsolved problems for most companies.
* Testing strategies for Iac deployments.
And more that I won't bother to list here.
This would make a great blog post: high hanging fruit of digital infrastructure
So, you're saying in 2025 businesses are expected to actually make money? What a novel concept. Will the wonders ever cease? I mean, you could expect that thing where you borrow incessantly to "gain traction" and "produce growth" but never produce any returns on it to run for a bit, especially in a new field where becoming #1 is at premium. But it has to stop somewhere. So it looks like somewhere is here.
The outcomes of this behavior will be devastating and the problems will last for generations.
Most of these companies and technologies won't last that long.
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Why?
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I have an infrastructure company and I'm focused 100% on developers. It definitely isn't easy, but I see it as the best path for the business.
You're not wrong. They add miniscule value. But what does that say about the people using these images who are now struggling to replace them?
You can't have it both ways.
If their value-add was miniscule then they should be trivial to replace.
If it's a struggle to replace them then that's the value they were adding.
No, the struggle is fully manufactured by this rug pull. If I had known this was going to happen when I was setting up my infra I could've used any number of other alternatives, including just building them myself, at little to no extra effort. Now I have to waste time migrating off of these.
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Packaging is not miniscule value, it's valuable gruntwork.
A lot of work that apparently is not valued enough to justify paying for.
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it doesn't say anything nice that "moderate inconvenience" is a "struggle"
I think this is now the Broadcom way !
If their contribution is minimal then the impact of this change should also be? But it appears it disruptive so they have been showing up for a long time and that’s one of the most difficult things.
Maybe the community can repackage it since Bitnami is only packaging.
Naive take.
That's like saying, "Honda isn't a car company, they're an assembly company because they don't mine the minerals to make the parts and rely instead on supply chains"
Well, Bitnami didn't produce own hardware stack either ;) Joke aside, it's not naive - CentOS, Alma, Rocky, Ubuntu... FOSS community has some experience with these things
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