IBM Acquires HashiCorp, the Status of OpenTofu, and the Future of Open Source with Matt Gowie

Matt Gowie is the Founder and CEO of Masterpoint, an Infrastructure as Code agency focused on helping clients accelerate their infrastructure journey. Matt has over a dozen years of experience specializing in tech startups, AWS architecture, and cloud infrastructure, with some serious rock climbing thrown in the mix. In this conversation, we discuss IBM’s recent acquisition of HashiCorp, the current state of open source, and break down a real Terraform to OpenTofu migration story.

Where to find Matt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/Gowiem/
GitHub: https://github.com/Gowiem

Episode Links
IBM buys HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm
OpenTofu Project: https://opentofu.org/
OpenTofu Migration: https://masterpoint.io/updates/opentofu-early-adopters/
tea (creators of Homebrew): https://tea.xyz/

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Transcript

Intro: 0:00

Matt Gowie is the founder and CEO of MasterPoint, an infrastructure as code agency focused on helping clients accelerate their infrastructure journey. Matt has over a dozen years of experience specializing in tech startups, aws architecture and cloud infrastructure, with some serious rock climbing thrown in the mix. In this conversation, we discuss IBM's recent acquisition of HashiCorp, the current state of open source and break down a real Terraform to OpenTOFU migration story.

William: 0:42

All right, Matt. Welcome to the illustrious and distinguished and just magnificent Cloud Gambit studio, or my home office, as I like to call it. Thanks for joining me. How are things going today for you?

Matt: 0:56

Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks, things are going good today. I'm back to back meetings. I just snuck in a shower right before this, so you know I was gross and sweaty from the gym earlier and now, you know, freshly clean ready to go.

William: 1:11

You didn't even have to shower. I mean, I can't smell you through the zoom waves, so I still put on deodorant though. Yeah, no, it's all good, Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you for coming on and do you want to just briefly, you know, introduce yourself to the audience? You know who is Matt and what do you do day to day.

Matt: 1:29

Sure, yeah, I'm the. I call myself the CTO or CEO of MasterPoint. You know I wear like five different hats every day. So, ceo, cto, technical lead, I don't know Uh, but yeah, I run a consulting firm uh called MasterPoint. Uh, there are six of us today, um, and we are focused on solving problems in the infrastructure as code space for clients. So we really uh Terraform OpenTofu. We would love to do a Pulumi project. Um, we're really uh deep in that space of automating helping people understand what are the best practices, helping them, you know, get up, skilled and then making sure everything's on rails. So that's what we focus on. And, yeah, I think that's like my the, the 20 second version of it awesome.

William: 2:22

Yeah, starting a company is no small exercise, you know. Usually it involves, you know, vision, you know some great ideas and really great people, but the execution of that idea is really what you know spins the tires. Of course, you know what led to you sort of founding MasterPoint and you know what has been your um, you know your experience, I guess moving from I think you did some sort of like director, a lot of software engineering in the past, things like that um, just your experience coming in is like a ceo and a founder. It's a different thing all together um, over the past. You know what is it?

Matt: 3:00

seven years something like that. Yeah, um, yeah, uh it. It's been a fun journey. I think it definitely didn't start there with a lot of vision or or anything of that nature. I, uh I I basically was a software development manager in Seattle.

Matt: 3:17

I had a small startup that I worked at, um when I started my career and got out of school and I worked there for a number of years and that ended up getting acquired and I then went and moved to Seattle as part of that acquisition, ended up leading that team and grew it to like 12 people or so and I had always wanted to travel. So I think I caught that bug early, when I was like 13. And when I looked at, hey, what am I doing? What's possible, I thought, okay, let me go and do solo consulting. I started MasterPoint in 2016, when I left that management gig and I really was just doing whatever came my way. I was an application engineer, like full stack. I did you know voice user interface projects. I did you know React projects. I did backend development and you know that was my way of doing the whole digital nomad thing. I did that from 2016.

Matt: 4:23

I was abroad for like around a year and a half and then I came back to the States and that, you know, is when I started to work more in the DevOps space. I already had a bunch of SRE and cloud experience from my running a team and running a product, and that is when I realized like, oh, terraform's amazing, this is a really cool tool. This actually makes me excited about DevOps, it makes me excited about building a platform for teams, and I started to focus there as an individual. And then, long story short, 2022, I was starting to feel burnt out as a solo consultant. I had a couple of projects and things were good, easy, but they were easy and I didn't really have enough of a challenge, um, so I started to go hands off keyboard Uh, I hire, brought on a couple of people, um, you know, some part-time, some full-time, uh, and then I've steadily, you know, started to take on the CEO moniker, uh, which you know. That's where the vision has come in and where we've, like, really developed our niche since then.

Matt: 5:25

And yeah it's been a fun journey. A lot of you know going to my, going back to the drawing board and going what am I doing? What are we? What are we doing now? Which has been fun, but I think we're on a good direction at the moment.

William: 5:40

Awesome, yeah, Constantly reinventing you know yourself and your value and all those things. I love it. That's a great, great story. And you, you know I didn't know this, but I was, you know, creeping around on some of the I think it was your LinkedIn or your GitHub or somewhere and you saw that you were like your side hobby, your side love, I would say, is rock climbing. Yeah, how did that start?

Matt: 6:07

would say is rock climbing. Um, yeah, how did that start? Um, it starts like most people get into rock climbing just like going to a gym, um, but it very quickly uh, turned into a, like a full-time passion, um, and yeah, I don't know. Uh, I think I am torn between, hey, what do I want to do more is build a business or, you know, go out climbing as much as possible, and I try and find that line where you know the business is doing well and I can get in climbing on the weekends or take a trip. But, yeah, that steadily ramped up. That happened, you know. I got into climbing probably 2015 and that has become so a lot of my big life goals are around hey, going to patagonia or going to the bugaboos in canada, or, you know, just doing some of the local stuff here in rocky mountain national park, like all my uh. Things I get really excited about outside of work are big alpine objectives and, um, climbing is just an amazing sport. It's really fun.

William: 7:03

Yeah, it's amazing. You, yeah, you, you, like you said you, you travel around. How many continents have you been on? Have you climbed on?

Matt: 7:11

Uh, yeah, five, Uh, and I'm excited to, you know, cross off the sixth. Um, but yeah, I've climbed um all over, except for South America and, of course, antarctica. I don't know if I'll ever cross off Antarctica, but, um, you know, I think, uh, I got to climb in Morocco with, uh, uh, you know, a partner of mine and that was really fun, and, uh, I would love to go back and climb in Africa. I've climbed a bunch all over Europe and Asia and, um, yeah, it's, it's been good.

William: 7:41

Spent a long time in Australia too good, spent a long time in australia too. That's awesome. Yes, I guess we better pivot and talk about the, the technical sounds good.

William: 7:50

So let's, yeah, let's, pivot over to the elephant in the room I would say and you know that is the the acquisition of hashly corp by ibm, aka big blue, for a whopping uh, 35 bucks a share. You know, valuing a transaction right at like 6.4 billion, all cash. Um well, what were your initial thoughts, uh, when you saw the news hit, you know, do you see it coming and did you ever consider ibm is a suitor for hashi corp?

Matt: 8:18

I I was pretty surprised honestly because, um, I I really thought that ibm and and hashi were like kind of against each other, like uh, particularly open bow, the fork of vault uh, and vault uh for those that don't know is hashi corpse moneymaker. Like their enterprise agreement uh, their enterprise sales agreements for vault uh are in the millions of dollars at the low level. They start off really really high and people pay it. But the OpenBOW project, that is the open source fork of Vault. Now that HashiCorp did the business source license change, the BSL change in August, that was supported by IBM and IBM has been selling services around HashiCorp and there's the water cooler talk that the reason why HashiCorp did the license change was because of IBM. So we will never probably know until you know, a couple of years from now, when somebody writes a book that we'll all have to read. I'm interested. If Armand will ever do that, I would love to read it.

Matt: 9:34

But you know, I was surprised just because I kind of expected those two to be warring more than be in an acquisition type of arrangement. So it was a surprise. I think I have a lot of skepticism I don't have much of the experience with. I got a little thumbs up bubble there, but I don't have much experience with IBM or dealing with them and I think that it's interesting to hear a lot of the people who work more with enterprises and mid-market folks that deal with IBM, consultants or deal with the IBM products, deal with Red Hat I've somehow escaped those issues in my career and you know, I think that there's a lot of fear that people have. So I'm a little bit skeptical just from what I hear from others. But we'll see. It should be interesting, you know, coming six months a year, two years, to see how things evolve.

William: 10:40

So you know one. Those are all great points. One thing I thought was interesting myself was pre-announcement HashiCorp stock was trading $25 a share. Earlier this year it tanked big time. I don't know if it ever went under $20 a share. But post-announcement, ibm stock actually slid 9%, which for IBM is probably like 20 billion dollars. Who knows, and you know, I know, that the quarterly earnings maybe had some sort of impact on that.

William: 11:12

That nine percent slide, you know, possibly, you know, resulting from the financial overlords like not, you know managing expectations and all those things you know but all this aside, given the path that, like hashicorp, was kind of on um after ipo, you know, post ipo, um do you think this acquisition is like actually maybe a net positive, like is there a silver lining for hashicorp, like ibm in the community, or is it just a bunch of unknown and, you know, kind of skeptical waiting, if you will?

Matt: 11:46

I, I think I didn't see one and you know, a good colleague of mine, eric Osterman, who runs Cloud Posse, has, like put out the possibility at least I'm he's the only person who I saw, you know, mentioned this, but he was, you know, saying that what his hope was is that, hey, maybe we get away from the business source license, like maybe there's a merger between OpenTofu and Terraform now and OpenBow and Vault, like is that the type of ecosystem that IBM wants to foster? Maybe, like, maybe that's what they're interested in. But I think that if there was something like that, that would be really cool, right, like we could have, you know, bridge the divide between the community break that got created when the BSL got mentioned or what came about, and I think that's a who knows what's going to happen, right, like who knows what IBM and Hashi execs are going to do. But, like I wasn't thinking that was possible at all and some people were giving some good ideas around that, and I think it's interesting.

Matt: 12:58

I think I don't know how these people think. Well enough, right, these executive types at these huge, massive companies. I will not even say that I have a guess at what is their long-term plan or what they think is profitable. I know that IBM is a sales machine and everybody you know kind of acknowledges that and thinks that that is, this could be a good fit, because IBM can just crank up the sales dial for for Hashi and wish them them luck.

William: 13:32

I don't know, it'll be interesting you made some really interesting points there and the timeline is just so bizarre. So, like, if you think of, like hashi corp, they announced their license changes from, you know, mozilla public to business source. You, you know, and like you, you brought up the their vault project. So IBM forks HashiCorp's vault project and it's I think it's even managed under the Linux foundation, you know, and and then they come and buy HashiCorp. It's just such a weird or interesting turn of events and I actually did. I posted something like, oh, this is really big for ibm. I posted on linkedin and I was like, hey, maybe they'll change the license back, maybe that'll be a thing. And I think it was. It was ned belevance that commented and he said, yeah, maybe, or the whole thing was premeditated, you know, and ibm wanted him to make that change. You know that way, you know, hashicorp can take that initial heat and PR, you know, before the big scoop up.

William: 14:36

It's yeah, it's hard to tell. Maybe if there's enough pressure from the community it will drive him to change it.

Matt: 14:42

Yeah, so far the pressure from the community has not been a driver. But to what you're saying, you know I've heard that same thing and maybe it was Ned that I, you know, saw him comment somewhere else. Um, but the it's, it's interesting because, yeah, there's these kind of um, opposing things that were happening, uh, and I've heard that idea, uh, that you know, maybe this was a precursor, like these acquisition cycles, for you know, a $6 billion purchase are like these acquisition cycles for you know, a six billion dollar purchase are not a, they don't happen in a month, or you know, three, right, like the timeline could actually make a lot of sense. But overall it seems confusing. And, yeah, I still I'll put it out there that I'm waiting for the book to be written about how this all went down from, like the exec level, because I would read it and I don't think I would say that about a lot of things.

Matt: 15:37

But I'm actually interested in this drama, yeah, because it involves so much of what we do in terms of tooling. She built some really great products and, yeah, we'll see what happens hashi built some really great products.

William: 15:53

Uh, and yeah, we'll see what happens. Yeah, absolutely yeah. If there's a book, I I would get it too.

Matt: 15:55

I'd be first in line. Well, maybe I wish I could invest in that, yeah, yeah, you know what history.

William: 16:01

Honestly, history is a great teacher. Um, you can learn a lot from history, which is kind of what makes this situation confusing as well, because so, uh, was it 2019 when ibm completed the acquisition of red hat?

Matt: 16:16

it seems something around there time flies.

William: 16:18

It seems like it was like last year.

Matt: 16:20

That feels like it was a lot longer.

William: 16:21

Um, yeah, I don't know so they completed this acquisition of red hat for 34 billion, you know, and they were. There was lots. I remember there was so much like assurances to customers and partners that hey, hey, IBM, they're going to remain deeply committed to open source and deeply committed to the community. And IBM actually did pay a 63% premium for Red Hat. A lot of folks think they overpaid, but, like I said, it's here nor there, but just last year, I think. Yeah, last year changes were made for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code availability only to paying customers, and there was that whole debacle that happened. So what do we take from that? And then you also look at IBM and they're forking a project under the Linux Foundation at the same time, and then they purchased HashiCorp. So you have all these things just sort of in this whirlpool and you know, I think it's going to be. We're just going to have to wait to see how it shakes out.

Matt: 17:21

Yeah, and you know that makes me think of the cycles come fast. Are we allowed to curse in the podcast?

William: 17:27

Go for it.

Matt: 17:28

Cool. Have you heard of the term in shitification? Yes, so. So it makes me think of that because it's. It's basically like, yes, somebody comes out with something you know, ibm buys red hat and it's like promises to entertain, to keep, to build and grow a community. And there's lots of um, hey're, we're there for you. Uh, we're building this for you, we're, we're going to be there for you. And then it comes down to earnings calls and it comes down to, hey, what is, what is this institution actually looking for? And, um, you know that things just get, uh, gets turned up that money needs to be made and big businesses can't really be, you know, held to any sort of morals or, you know, standard, because they can just go well, hey, we needed to improve shareholder value. We needed to improve shareholder value, and I think that's why it's so important to have things like the Linux Foundation and the CNCF. There are reasons why projects should be within those organizations and it really just keeps everybody honest and on the same level, and that's what I try and support.

William: 18:47

I love that. Yeah, I mean honestly. So nobody wants to work for free. First of all, I've got two kids, another one on the way, like my oldest place travel hockey, which is like you know, I might as well just go get another car payment. It's more than that, you know. So do you think like a successful model and bridge for open source and like the corporate interest is the idea of like many corporations pooling together and funding projects, with the pivot of the project itself being managed by a foundation? I think that's the key there. You know, that way really, the corporate entity doesn't own it, but it still wins a lot of organizations, everybody kind of wins, they're still winning, yeah, of organizations, everybody kind of wins, they're still winning.

Matt: 19:30

Organizations benefit yeah, I would love to see that happen more. I would love to see more bigger companies involved in donating to the linux foundation and like really, um, that sort of entity being really important, um, this makes me think of, like as, like, the idea of, like, the future of open source. I think that there's just with Hashi's license change, with Redis's license change, you know, I think that we're seeing this happening again and again and we're kind of in a, you know, not a recession, but maybe like a down economy. Right, there isn't any VC money happening, there isn't as much spend going on, people are holding on to their budgets. Money happening, there isn't as much spend going on, people are holding onto their budgets. I think that, from a community aspect, I don't know if we can rely without really great fundraisers and without new careers coming up around. Hey, let's build out how we convince these companies to contribute more to open source. I don't know how to solve that problem, but what the the some of the cool stuff that I have seen come up? Um is, there's a project called tea, uh, and it's by one of the folks who was behind homebrew, um, but it's this idea that, hey, you um are paying into, you know kind of a slush fund for open source, and open source projects get a ranking within how much they're used within package managers and registries, and then those open source projects are getting a cut of that slush fund that's getting created and unfortunately it's a big blockchain project and I don't think that we've solved the usability problems that are around blockchain yet and I, honestly, am not that big of a blockchain person. I think it's complicated and you know that doesn't have that much utility yet.

Matt: 21:23

But I think that that sort of idea is where we as a community, whereas individual developers or smaller companies or you know groups of people who are running open source, they can see some sort of return and I think that that might be a path down in the future where we're collectively getting together to say, hey, we all build on open source, we're all benefiting from this amazing work that people are doing.

Matt: 21:49

Like it all goes back to that, like famous XKCD, which I feel like I've seen more in the past, like year or two where there's like the small block that everything else is built on and we should all be contributing to support those people, support those projects and the teams that are building open source, and I hope to see more of that, and I think that there's like two sides to it. There's the like Linux foundation needs more money. See more of that and I think that there's like two sides to it. There's the like linux foundation needs more money. There's also like, hey, what can we do from a grassroots standpoint? Um, and it's interesting, it's, we'll see what happens.

William: 22:17

Yeah yeah, I guess it's. So if you think about, like some of these big big, you know, the big big companies out there, it's like, oh, they built a lot of their services on top of open source without really giving back and their origins. And it's one of those things where maybe they just say, yeah, they took it and they're using it and like once, oh, we didn't have to pay for it, why are we going to go and try and fund and do things now?

Matt: 22:46

it's you know all the money, yeah and it should just be a standard right, like it should be. Um, there should be some bare minimum level of giving that you need to do, and it might not even be the big enterprises that you know need to make that change, like I think you could end up relying on them a ton. But there's, you know, tens of thousands of mid-market businesses that you know, yeah, have built so much on open source, and even if all of them gave a small, small percentage, it would make a huge difference. So, yeah, where's the open source tax? That's what we need.

William: 23:24

There you go. I totally agree. We're going to pivot to, I think my this is sort of what I real like. All this other stuff was extremely interesting, but this has been like at the you know top of mind for me. But you know, back in August, you know last year, terraform was obviously forked and Open Tofu was born. And I mean it wasn't a clean and drama-free birth. There's no birth czar, as we've discussed but I happened to notice on the MasterPoint website that there was a blog and in that blog there were some words and these words told a story about MasterPoint's first client transitioning from Terraform proper to Open Tofu. And it wasn't some small environment either. I actually wrote down on a sticky note so I could read it. It was 2,386 resources, 90 state files or workspaces, 39,000 lines of terraform across 480 files. So that wasn't a science project, it was a legit, big, fairly sizable environment yeah.

Matt: 24:31

Yeah, how did that go Went beautifully. We were surprised. I was surprised I did that personally myself and I expected it to kind of take a bunch of time to hit a bunch of issues and I kind of, you know, was expecting, hey, this is going to be a beta type of a thing. But of course, hey, they're starting off from a fork, they're appending onto it and they have a really strong team. The Open Tofu folks are all really smart and really involved. I think that the people who are backing that project, they really put some of their best people into what is becoming the awesome OpenTofu team. So they've done a really good job and it went really smoothly as a result.

Matt: 25:16

What that blog post goes into for 30% or 40% of it is really about hey, what did we need to change about how we automate Terraform, how we automate Tofu and how does that look? Now that we need to pipe through that we're running a different command at the end of the day. And that was me doing some open source contributions. That was the majority of what I had to do to make it happen. But everything else just translated well and we didn't have any breakages, we didn't have any major issues and then since then it's gone very smoothly. I think that the only complaints that I've had are around the Tofu registry, which has been the tiniest bit. Hey, I have to run another Terraform plan every 300 Terraform plans because the registry just wasn't able to download a module or a provider or something. And that's in my book. Considering how early it is is not a big deal, so we've had good success with it. Yeah, Trivial.

William: 26:15

Yeah, that's awesome, it's good to hear that and I think one of the things for adoption for OpenTofu, like in a broader sense, is going to be, I'd say, evangelizing the success stories and talking about them. To give to, you know, give confidence, because I don't know, I know when Terraform first hit the market, you know before it, you know before it hit a one oh release, open source and it was one of the few tools like I worked in enterprise for a long time and it was like one of the very few tools where it was like so valuable to like our infrastructure and dealing with infrastructure that we were allowed to bring it in and use it almost in like an unfettered sense. And now that it's morphed and matured and you have this big company and you have you know they're negotiating SLAs and the managed services and all these things, it almost becomes a oh like nobody got fired for for buying hp or cisco, kind of thing so we just want to

William: 27:14

go with the biggest player in the room. But, as you know, open tofu gets more valuable and it sort of has, maybe, different innovation, and here's a good question. So do you think like is open tofu and terraform, like their paths are going to diverge, like more and more over time? You know do you think it's going to be harder to pull off. You know this sort of migration as smooth as it was for you. You know this go around.

Matt: 27:40

Yeah, I think migrating back will be a different question. But, like you know, with 1.7.0, opentofu just got released. It sounds like it's a direct port for and not direct as in they copy code, but direct as in functionality for some of the functionality that was newly released in Terraform 1.7. But there's some new opt-in features like state encryption, for example. Um, I think if you do the yeah, yeah, uh, if you do the migration from, you know, 1.7 Terraform to 1.7 Tofu, you're not going to have any problems. To me it sounds like, um, we haven't upgraded yet, but we will soon.

Matt: 28:25

Um, but the the thing I think you know people could get themselves into a uh, into a tight spot with is if they were to take on new tofu functionality that's not in Terraform and then if they ever needed to migrate back and I don't know why you would at some point, but like, um, you know, if you wanted to pay Terraform cloud five X what you know their competitors uh charge, then maybe, yeah, you would need to move back from tofu to Terraform, cause I don't see Terraform cloud supporting tofu at any point in the future.

Matt: 29:01

Um, but yeah, I can see some of those divergences being an issue if you're like, yeah, let's swap back and forth every week. But I can't see it being an issue if you're a stock standard Terraform shop and you're doing this one-time migration. I think it's just going to be easy. And I haven't heard anything that's raised alarm bells for me in regards to oh, that'll be a divergence that'll actually break things. That hasn't come up yet and it's still early right, like I think maybe a year from now, when there's like a 2.0 version of both of these tools, we'll see some of those and you know, people will need to have more complicated migration steps and they'll need to work through that. But I don't see it today and that's kind of a good thing if you're thinking about moving sooner rather than later.

William: 29:50

Yeah, yeah, those are good, good points, and you know, as you already alluded to, like one of the, I think something that is amazing that we've all witnessed at this point is with this fork is there's a gigantic talented and very motivated community has rallied behind the open tofu project and it's just been so. I I think pretty refreshing to see that, um, it's been awesome.

Matt: 30:20

The community, yeah, yeah so I.

Matt: 30:24

I think that that is the best thing about Terraform. It's what gets me excited about the project and the ecosystem is that, hey, there is this. There's a ton of open source, the providers are open source, the modules are open source and people are doing a good job of maintaining them and pushing them forward. That was the reason why Terraform got the adoption it did, and that's why I think the BSL license change was such a. You know, I think that HashiCorp did that license change more for Vault than they did for Terraform At least that's what folks say.

Matt: 31:02

And yet I think on the Terraform side, it's such a community ecosystem driven tool that it felt like a. Really, at least personally, it felt kind of like what do you mean I can't use this tool that I've contributed into, I've been a part of this ecosystem for many years. What do you mean I can't use it with this vendor? That's cheaper, or what I prefer, or what I'm using today, or what I prefer or what I'm using today, and that that felt like a slight right, like that. That was a. That's why we were all had so much opinions in the game. And, yeah, I think that it's cool to see it on the OpenTofu side, because you can see, hey, there's things moving, there's people that are passionate and pushing, pushing the envelope, moving things forward, and it's really cool.

William: 31:57

Yeah, yeah. And so everyone has their own self-interest in these types of situations, of course, usually, like technical engineers, you know maybe the ones contributing to open source, you know they have a very different set of interests than corporate suits. You know to keep the business profitable and you know kind of rolling forwards, but you you do need to have both to be successful to some degree. Of course. You know to keep that ship, you know kind of moving. Do you see, like, is there any hope? Like glass half full of, like a brighter future where the suits and the engineers can kind of coexist? You know, without so much friction, especially with open source being in the news, it's just constant. You know the past four years.

Matt: 32:35

Um, I don't know, I, I, I, I wish I was more optimistic about that than I, than I think I am. I think you can read um, I always forget his name. Um, the CEO of Ashy Corp, wrote an article that almost read like satire to me, at least, where he was talking about like the open source business model is dead and you know, we had multiple customers who were asking us to go towards the business source license and it was like derogatory in a way that it was like it was just kind of Trumpian almost, and it was like derogatory in a way that it was like it was just kind of Trumpian almost, not to get political, but like just he sounded kind of like Trump and I just kept thinking like, hey, if you're the CEO of a huge, one of the most famous open source companies Hashcorp, you know, just built all these open source tools. They built a business off making great open source. If he's the CEO and he's saying these derogatory things about open source projects and the business that he came in as CEO built itself on being open source, I don't have great feelings about it.

Matt: 33:45

I like, I hope for the best. I, you know, would love to be able to make the case to more execs that hey, this open source thing runs everything that you interact with on a day-to-day basis. But I don't. I personally haven't seen it, but I don't think I run in those circles that much. So maybe there's a whole ecosystem of like-level folks who are carrying the torch and I wish I knew them. If any of them are on here and you want to chat, I'm always happy to. But yeah, I wish I had a better answer there. But I feel like I'm a little bit jaded.

William: 34:23

That's how I feel too, because I mean, if history again back back to history, it keeps happening and nothing really truly changes you, you be, yeah, you begin to become jaded on the whole thing. And yeah, and I feel like with his that I remember that, that I read that as well and I remember thinking, um, like okay, he didn't write this, like somebody wrote it for him and he had, you know, he probably didn't even publish it, like he just had to approve it, like he probably didn't have a choice.

William: 34:51

But I mean, that's the game you play. When you get up to that level and you ipo and you, you have a lot of public, you're, you're beholden to shareholders and all these other things in the market. You, you go into a different machine altogether.

Matt: 35:04

Yeah, that's a really good point yeah, um, I I can be critical from my armchair here, uh, but I'll be honest, I would not want to be in that position in the slightest. I wouldn't want to have to be beholden to shareholders like, um, I wish hash corp had never gone public, I wish uh, you know that would have been a better case in my mind. I think they would have done better as a business and then maybe I wouldn't have lost a bunch of money on buying shares pretty early on and then having to sell them around the BSL license change issue. But yeah, it's not an easy position to be in a public company, for sure.

William: 35:42

Yeah, I'm generally like a very positive, even like in bad scenarios like glass half full, stay as positive as as possible. But this is one scenario, too, where I'm just thinking like okay, we're come on, is there a light somewhere? Like how is this gonna um end up positive? Which is why I like open tofu. That project is just so um so daggone refreshing yeah, it's cool and yeah, so this has been great chatting with you, matt.

Matt: 36:09

Yeah.

William: 36:09

I really enjoyed it. I learned a little bit as well, which is nice. Do you want to tell the audience where to find you? Are you on any of the socials? I know you're on LinkedIn and GitHub.

Matt: 36:18

I'll have those in the notes that or X, whatever you want to call that. But yeah really, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You can follow me there. That's always good. We have a newsletter at masterpointio and we're publishing blog content around infrastructure as code there. I've got some really smart people on my team who are helping me make that stuff happen and, yeah, some exciting stuff coming up ahead. So subscribe to the newsletter and check out the website and, yeah, follow me on LinkedIn.

William: 36:57

Stay tuned and I will link the Open Tofu blog in the notes for sure, because that was a great blog Into all the good details that you'd want to go into. It was fantastic read Awesome.

Matt: 37:08

Thank you, I appreciate that that sure and read it yeah, all right, thank you very much.