
Announcing HashiCorp (a Company for Vagrant) - Argorak
http://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-hashicorp.html
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mitchellh
I'm here to answer any questions, if you have them. I'm really excited!

Fun fact, I first "launched" Vagrant on HN almost exactly 1000 days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901>

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aashay
Maybe this is a stupid question, but how do you pronounce HashiCorp? Is it
"HAA-she" (rhymes with Kashi, like the cereal) or is it "HASH-i" (rhymes with
"flashy")? I'm guessing it's the former since it'd match the Japanese
pronunciation of your last name...?

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mitchellh
Rhymes with Kashi. ^_^

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recursive
I'm outing myself as a philistine here, but how do you pronounce Kashi, if it
doesn't rhyme with flashy?

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yusefnapora
I think it rhymes with 'squashy' or 'washy'.

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aashay
Heh I probably should've gone with squashy or washy, but whenever I try to
pick a rhyming word, I take the suffix syllable and prepend every letter in
the alphabet until I come up with a word (aashi, bashi, cashi...). Kashi
won... :\

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orangethirty
Use a backpacker for the mascot. It matches what the product does better.
Homeless people dont have much stuff. Backpackers have and take their stuff
everywhere. Which is the spirit of what you are doing. Have your stuff
avaiable everywhere. So, a backpacker.

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dekz
I'm having trouble understanding your recommendation. Vagrants take ALL of
their belongings with them, they have little where else to store any items
they. Backpackers couldn't possibly take everything they own with them or they
would by definition be Vagrants.

I think having a Vagrant as the mascot for Vagrant is the only obvious option.

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orangethirty
Ok, my point is that both take their belogings with them. Backpackers take the
stuff they need to travel around. Same as Vagrants, as you mentioned. But, to
the market, having a Vagrant as a mascot _might_ be seen in bad taste. Thus,
to reduce the chance of rain over his parade, he could potentially just change
mascots. That way, people who get _easily offended by anything_ won't have an
excuse to say anything. Plus, when this product gets more and more traction,
people _will_ question the mascot choice. That's why Frostred Flakes has Tony
the Tiger, and not Bad Luck Johnny that lives under a bridge. Its all about
perception. Though this is an issue some hacker don't get, because to them the
world is black and white. Not saying it is _you_ , of course. Just talking out
loud.

Also, why the only _obvious_ option?

Why couldn't it be a Puppy, Cat, Horse, Printer, Cloud, Keyboard, Fish, or
anything else? Why the Vagrant? Its not obvious. For all the client know
Vagrant might be an acronym or some made up tech name.

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lixef
@mitchellh Congratulations first! As I've been reading your tweets I've been
guessing that you would starting, which focuses you on Vagrant.

I have a few questions: When did you think about the first time and when did
you really decide to do this step? How do you start? Bootstrap it by your own
or try to go with for a VC? How are you planning the addon open source/paid
addon ratio will be like?

I wish you all the best for your company. And because I've been using Vagrant
every day: Thank you very much.

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mitchellh
> When did you think about the first time and when did you really decide to do
> this step?

The inkling of a possibility of something like this only entered my head
around March/April 2012. I committed to the idea in June 2012.

> How do you start? Bootstrap it by your own or try to go with for a VC?

I'm attempting to bootstrap it on my own for now, because I think I have a
solid foundation so there is a clear line to revenue. Of course, my runway to
do this is much shorter than if I had VC funding. On the other hand, I have a
lot more freedom without VC funding.

> How are you planning the addon open source/paid addon ratio will be like?

There will be many more open source add-ons, and I think it should be this
way.

Thank YOU for using Vagrant. :)

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paulsmith
Can the first order of business be a renaming so the mascot of a useful and
widely-used product isn't a homeless person?

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mitchellh
The project won't be renamed, but it will be rebranded in the next few weeks.
In the three years the project has existed I have only gotten two or three
complaints about the mascot, but everyone has agreed that "Vagrant" itself is
fine. Note that I've talked up to some pretty high levels of US government
using Vagrant, and most are okay with it. One [fairly large/visible]
organization within the US government has said they can't use it until the
mascot is changed.

Vince the Vagrant is being retired.

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evanphx
Vince has a really good 401k plan, despite his scruff look. He's going to be
sipping drinks on a Caribbean beach before we know it!

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shizcakes
Where can I go to find more information about Vagrant's plans for supporting
more hypervisors than Virtualbox?

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Hupo
Congrats! I should probably get around to actually testing Vagrant one of
these days too...

Also, the website looks absolutely gorgeous. Fantastic work there.

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trotsky
good luck! vagrant seems to fit a sweet spot in real world configuration
management needs. i look forward to a future independent of oracle.

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ecspike
Came here to say hi and congrats Mitchell. Was fun hanging out in CZ, we
should do it again, this time, stateside.

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dreamdu5t
Vagrant is a VirtualBox with a bunch of packages pre-installed? Am I correct?

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pearkes
Nope - Vagrant is a tool for managing VM providers.

Virtualbox has been the main provider it manages. Part of this announcement
includes adding support for more providers!

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minikomi
Just a heads up: Your favicon is almost identical to <http://gree-corp.com/> ,
big social game maker in Japan.

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cheapsteak
It's a cube

Surely you can't trademark a cube?

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minikomi
Fair enough. It's maybe not such a problem in the U.S. where the logo isn't in
the media much, but to me the blue hexagon immediately triggered recognition.
I'm only passing on the info.

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kanwisher
Any plans for helping unit test vm creation? One of the biggest problems I've
had is trying to verify that my Chef installation works after each change

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regularfry
Excellent. I've been watching Vagrant from the sidelines. It's looking great,
but it's useless to me until it gets a KVM backend.

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sciurus
Until it does, you might want to try McCloud.

<https://github.com/jedi4ever/mccloud/>

<http://jedi.be/blog/2011/09/13/libvirt-fog-provider/>

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ukd1
Congratulations and best of luck Mitchell!

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heyadam
Congrats! Looking forward to see how Vagrant grows over the next couple years.

