Do you love licensing drama? Last week HashiCorp made headlines with an announcement by CTO Armon Dadgar that they’re changing licensing models. HashiCorp is now adopting the Business Source License, or BSL, which was popularized by MariaDB and Couchbase. Under the BSL, HashiCorp code will remain freely available and usable for non-production use. You may be granted a license for production use if your project doesn’t compete with HashiCorp. If it does you’ll need to buy a commercial license. The move has generated a lot of discussion and speculation in the community given how prevalent projects like Terraform are. This and more on the Rundown.
0:43 – NVIDIA Launches Refreshed H100 Without Intel
NVIDIA has unveiled a new iteration of Grace Hopper, their CPU and GPU combo. The GH200 features updated GPU components and HBM3e-based memory, which is significant in its own right but there’s a surprise lurking inside: Both Intel and AMD are left out in the cold as NVIDIA focuses on their own Arm CPU platform! Is this a warning sign for the industry?
Read More: NVIDIA Announces a New NVIDIA H100 144GB HBM3e Model and an Anticipated Business Model Shift
4:41 – Years of Intel CPUs affected by Downfall Bug
Last week was Black Hat, which means lots of security vulnerabilities were released publicly. one of the biggest was codenamed “Downfall” and it affects generations of Intel CPUs. In essence, Downfall can use CPU instructions to fetch data from protected CPU registers, even encrypted ones that shouldn’t be read by a particular software program. Daniel Moghimi disclosed the bug to Intel about a year ago and fixes are availble for systems. Systems, plural, because this bug affects processors all the way back to 6th generation sold in 2015. It does not affect Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, likely due to the disclosure last year. The current fix does reduce fetch performance by up to 50% according to Intel. Tom, is this the sequel to Meltdown?
Read More: “Downfall” bug affects years of Intel CPUs, can leak encryption keys and more
9:06 – Groq and Samsung Foundry Bring Next-Gen LPU
AI chipmaker Groq is looking to Samsung’s Foundry for their next generation tensor processors. The company will use Samsung’s advanced SF4X (4nm) process node to improve performance and reduce power consumption for their future chips. Although Moore’s Law is slowing, there’s still tremendous value in moving to new process nodes, and competitoon in the advanced foundry space is really heating up. Should we be looking beyond TSMC and Intel?
Read More: Groq Selects Samsung Foundry to Bring Next-gen LPU™ to the AI Acceleration Market
13:43 – OpenELA is formed by Oracle, SUSE, and More
Oracle, SUSE, and the sponsor of Rocky Linux are teaming up. After the recent drama from the Red Hat licensing changes, the new group that has styled themselves as the Open Enterprise LInux Association, or OpenELA. The group has come together under the promise of “no passwords and no barriers” according to the statement on the homepage. The goal is establish source code and distribution of enterprise Linux distributions that is compatible with RHEL with bug-for-bug code matching. Tom, what’s going to happen now that the stars have aligned against Red Hat?
Read More: Oracle, SUSE and others caught up in RHEL drama hit back with OpenELA
18:03 – Intel Terminates Tower Semiconductor Acquisition
As we mentioned in April, China has been cracking down on mergers, and now the State Administration for Market Regulation, known as SAMR, has quashed Intel’s proposed acquisition od Tower Semiconductor, which we covered back in February of 2022. Intel will hand a $353 million payment to Tower. This deal faced regulatory challenges from the beginning, but their decision to appoint a new head of foundry efforts likely made these worse. Tower Semiconductor’s expertise would have strengthened Intel’s foundry efforts, so is this a major setback?
Read More: Intel Announces Termination of Tower Semiconductor Acquisition
21:27 – Itential and Alkira Team Up
Tech Field Day favorites Alkira and Itential have announced a partnership to help automate multicloud networking. Alkira has long been focused on providing networking solutions for muticloud organizations by reducing complexity of implementation. Itential has also be a long-standing proponent of low-code network automation aimed to reduce complexity in deployment. Sounds like a perfect match, doesn’t it? The joint integration is aimed specifically at onboarding, security, and inter-region connectivity.
24:27 – Business Source License Adopted by HashiCorp
Do you love licensing drama? Last week HashiCorp made headlines with an announcement by CTO Armon Dadgar that they’re changing licensing models. HashiCorp is now adopting the Business Source License, or BSL, which was popularlized by MariaDB and Couchbase. Under the BSL, HashiCorp code will remain freely avaialble and usable for non-production use. You may be granted a license for production use if your project doesn’t compete with HashiCorp. If it does you’ll need to buy a commercial license. The move has generated a lot of discussion and speculation in the community given how prevalent projects like Terraform are. Stephen, was this a gaff by HashiCorp? Or are opponenents trying paint them as the villains?
Read More: HashiCorp adopts Business Source License
39:41 – The Weeks Ahead
VMware Explore US and Tech Field Day Extra – August 21-24, 2023
SNIA SDC and Storage Field Day 26 – September 18-21, 2023
Edge Field Day 2 – October 4-5, 2023
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.
