IBM Corporation announced about the conclusion agreements for the purchase of a company HashiCorpwhich develops tools Vagrant, Packer, Hermes, Nomad And Terraform. The size of the deal will be $6.4 billion. The transaction, which has already been approved by the boards of directors of IBM and HashiCorp, is planned to be completed by the end of the year after receiving approval from HashiCorp shareholders (the largest shareholders have expressed their willingness to vote for the transaction) and regulatory authorities. Following the acquisition, HashiCorp will continue to operate under its own name as a separate division of IBM.
IBM intends to use HashiCorp's developments to create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform that provides tools for software lifecycle management with support for different cloud environments, both external and deployed on its servers. The platform will be built taking into account the increasing complexity of modern cloud implementations and the advancement of machine learning systems. The acquisition of HashiCorp is expected to help IBM strengthen its position in areas such as IT process automation, data protection and consulting, as well as help develop the Watsonx platform and Red Hat products. For example, combining Red Hat Ansible Automation's configuration management capabilities with HashiCorp Terraform's process automation capabilities will enable a new hybrid cloud solution that simplifies application delivery and configuration.
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There is no word yet on the possibility of returning HashiCorp projects to an open license. Let us recall that initially HashiCorp products were developed under the open MPL license, but in August 2023 they were transferred to the proprietary BSL 1.1 license, which limits the use of code in cloud systems that compete with HashiCorp products and services. The change in license was explained by the desire to maintain funding for their developments in the face of the inability of classical licensing models to resist the parasitism of companies using ready-made open source codes of HashiCorp’s developments to create their own commercial cloud products without participating in joint development.
The license change led to the creation of forks OpenTofu and OpenBao, which continued the development of the open source code bases of the infrastructure maintenance automation platform Terraform and storage Vault. The development of forks has been transferred to a neutral platform of the Linux Foundation and is carried out using an open management model with the participation of a community formed from companies and enthusiasts interested in the project. For example, about support for OpenTofu and the intention to participate in the development of a fork announced 161 companies and 792 individual developers who allocated resources equivalent to 18 full-time engineers over the next 5 years to develop the fork.
A few days ago the OpenTofu project received from HashiCorp requirement on the cessation of illegal activities (cease and desist), offering to voluntarily eliminate the violation under the threat of possible legal action. The OpenTofu project was accused of infringing OpenTofu's intellectual property by migrating changes from the Terraform branch, added under the BSL license, to the OpenTofu branch, delivered under the MPL license. Representatives of OpenTofu didn't agree with a claim and brought proof the fact that previously the controversial code was present in the old code base with an MPL license, but then, when implementing additional functionality, it was copied by HashiCorp developers into code under a BSL license.
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