Hi! Co-founder of Endor/Rover here, happy to answer questions you may have

What’s next? Where do you expect to go from here?

Hi! I’m Daniel, one of the cofounders of the project mentioned in the article. Happy to answer any questions!

I wish something existed for the Amazon Cloudcams I still have around …

Yes, if your code does not live long enough to become legacy ... the project failed. All good code is (or will be) legacy code by definition. Most companies and projects die because nobody cares about them, not because they were difficult to maintain.

Jove and Jed were (are still in some cases!) my go-to options when Emacs was too heavyweight

Hi, former cofounder of Bitnami here. I left VMware quite a while ago, so not involved with this. The technical team at Bitnami is still top notch and great people. I am quite baffled at this business decision.

Is there a company more "Take what you can, give nothing back" than Broadcom? Probably not.

Broadcom's continued ability to perform well while only serving ever more upmarket areas, & cutting everyone else loose (& generally giving no figs) is fantastically impressive.

Broadcom is just private equity buying products to bleed dry. Nobody thinks VMware is the future, but the folks that use it are enterprises with deep pockets who are slow and reluctant to change so you can multiply the price by big numbers and get paid big while your dying acquired product meets its end.

VMware's lock on enterprise virtualization simultaneously made it essentially impossible for anyone else to compete like-for-like using a different platform and probably also doomed VMware's attempt to start pivoting to containers.

We were pretty successful moving to proxmox. They dont have the support some companies want but xcpng does. There are half decent options out there for corp use.

There are. I worked for a company that had a good KVM-based enterprise virtualization alternative with support. But they never had great commercial success with it displacing VMware. I understand they're having a lot more luck with a kubevirt-based option today post Broadcom acquisition of VMware.

If you have the resources to deal with kubevirt (read you are large enough for the increased efficiency across larger installations to overcome the higher cost of kubernetes labor) it's pretty decent. There are a shocking number of sub 5 location places out there that just need 2 low end boxes to virtualize active directory, tenable or equivalent scanner and a few other things that should be choosing xcpng or maybe proxmox if they are doing the analysis rationally (lol).

Oracle.

In fairness, Oracle keeps developing JVM and Java rather nicely, and keeps it open enough. I had expected worse.

Java has a much stronger open source community with lots of corporate players. If Oracle tried to close the doors on it, everybody can pivot away in much shorter time than Vmware.

Where were all those players when Google torpedoed Sun?

The large majority of work done in OpenJDK is by Oracle employees.

Had it been for most of those players, Java 6 would have been the last version.

I don't exactly get what you mean by "Google torpedoed Sun".

Corporate players came into play after Oracle acquired Sun. The fear that Oracle would do the same as LibreOffice pushed players like IBM to have their own Java distributions.

Of course Oracle having more support for OpenJDK is not surprising. However, the open nature and existing players already make it easier to fork / replace Java compared to Vmware.

Sun did not sue Google because they already lacked the money to do so.

What Google did with Android, it is hardly any different from Microsoft with J++, only that there the courts had another outcome.

Android with a Java subset and Kotlin, is hardly any different outcome than .NET with C#.

Corporate players came in, after money was available again, after the acquisition.

"James Gosling Triangulation's Interview on Google vs. Sun"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&t=3462s

"James Gosling on Android and Java"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT__Nrr3PNI&t=6245s

If Google actually cared about Java, they missed their opportunity to acquire Sun, own Java, do whatever they felt like doing with it for Android, and the rest of the industry, and best of all, they would never had to bother with any lawsuit.

Given how much the so called existing players contributed to save Java while Sun was going under, that is whishful thinking.

nobody familiar with broadcom or how they are run should be even remotely surprised by this decision

It’s mostly that they don’t understand their own users and potential customers in this particular case of Bitnami. There are so many other ways to increase revenue without alienating the core developer base. Enterprise want stability, breaking changes is a poor way to convince someone to pay you.

Is there other ways that are just as easy?

Last company was pretty heavy free user of Bitnami charts for various things but biggest being Redis clusters. I can't imagine they could convert everything into a cluster using their own charts before this kicks in. Very possible they end up tossing at least a year worth of licensing towards Bitnami.

Yes. Whatever money you get with this is going to be small and short-lived. The big money is in compliance. That is a GTM problem, not a technical one.

I was a service provider of Zimbra and had great relations with VMware folks on Page Mill many moons ago. One my friends helped move VMware HQs within PA just out of college.

Fuck Wall St. greedy morons at Broadcom. Hubris will educate them the hard way as they fade in relevance.

I take daily walks, and sometimes walk that campus. It always baffled me that it was bigger than my home town.

All gone now. Sad.

The article provides a few examples. Basically is a way to get a lightweight Linux when you cannot assume Docker will be there or will be an extra dependency to manage/require.

Examples: Run a MySQL database for development purposes, run a Linux signing script in Windows, run some legacy code as part of a modern web stack, isolated environments for AI agents, etc

This is great work. Squeezing performance out of V8 helps the entire web ecosystem and Node.

The fact that you need HN and competitors to explain your offering should make Google reflect …

The Gemini billing dashboard makes me feel sad and confused.

Nope. Sooner is better than the alternative in nearly every case! Also take HN feedback with a grain of salt …