I went to IBM(India) interview sometime in 2011, after leaving GlusterFS (Red Hat). Interview went well, during final call with management. I was asked to stop working on Open Source during weekends or off-hours even though the IBM project and my Open Source work has nothing in common.
I said, "I thought, IBM support Open Source right?" his response, "Yes, but that's another team"
I am currently working for IBM and I'm tied. I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. What I have in contract is - if you want to open a company, you need IBM's permission first.
And it's just frustrating as they try to block it for as long as possibe even if you're not doing IT in your private little business.
A long time ago I joined IBM via an acquistion of the company I worked for. One part of the (lengthy) contract I had to sign, was a form listing any side projects I may have that I would be required to no longer work on. I simply omitted that page when I returned the contract and no one ever noticed.
> I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue.
I am pretty sure this is the standard practice at all large companies, at least in the US. Small companies may just not care too much, but even at a small company if your management notices you might have to choose between that and your day coding. I wish it was not like this, but to me this is at least somewhat justifiable.
Much worse is the desire of most employers to control everything you do, including your work on open source project off hours. Want to fix coordinate computation for an open source satellite sim? Call the lawyers first. Lead a robotics club at a high school? Check with the management. IMO many employees do it anyway and hope to not get called on this, but this is formally going against the contract.
People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it.
I've routinely done this with every contract I've ever signed. Nothing gets signed without legal scrutiny on my part and it never will; and I've quite literally never had a potential client or employer balk at this.
All of them have agreed that my amendments have been quite reasonable - and that includes scrubbing through any sections that prevent me from working for other clients or writing my own projects, commercial or otherwise.
Ensuring a contract is fair and equitable is part of doing business. There is nothing wrong with this. When you work for a company, you are still an autonomous person with your own agency. Any company that seeks to deny that agency don't deserve your employ.
Any reasonable and honourable company expects you to review contracts and amend them. You shouldn't feel bad about doing this. Nor should you feel coerced by the fact that they have given you a one sided contract. Make it equitable.
I don't care if you're IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or God almighty, himself. If you choose to attempt to quell my agency, our relationship is done. I will not be denied my agency and neither should anyone else.
Those companies that over-reach in a bid to control their employees are unscrupulous. This is the same kind of toxic behaviour that people seek to avoid in their relationships, yet somehow they're quite willing to live their life working in relationships like this... I don't understand the double standard.
I've heard soooooo many people say that "contracts are just standard paper and if I rock the boat I won't get the job."
Don't be bullied into signing a contract because you feel like you don't have any other option.
Contracts are not "standard paper," they are legally binding documents that seek to limit your behaviour. Don't let any employer reach outside their jurisdiction and into your personal life. Ever.
>People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it.
How do people do this these days? Virtually everything I sign these days from my employment contract to my lease to the vast majority of the paperwork for my mortgage was all signed electronically. There's no apparent mechanism for redlining sections when e-signing.
(OT) I interviewed with IBM after they were acquiring my companies resources at the time. My first two interviews went swimmingly. On my third the interviewer had marked through my last name on my resume and when I asked about it she said she assumed I had spelled it wrong. That was the best thing that happened in the interview.
Funnily enough, one of the most praised points in Red Hat's code of conduct is the fact that it specifically says that you can work on open source projects _even if it is to the detriment to Red Hat_. Guess that's going to change now.
As IBMer you should know there are a plurality of local IBM all over the world, each with local laws and regulations to abide. In Italy all work produced off hours as subordinate is intellectual property of the employer by default unless you sign off a release form for each of them. In Ireland at least they don't want you to touch third party open source code without license vetting because it could inspire you subconsciously and result in copyright infringement.
I can see Joel's points here and this is relevant to the discussion.
It's probably the article he has written I disagree with the most as there is a simple way to deal with this; be very clear about the projects, code and designs the employee works on each month and sign them over as they are delivered. That way the employee's own work will be clear should there be any legal wrangling. This could be done by a status in Jira for example.
What wouldn't be the 5th time I've heard such stories, but I don't think it's in any way specific to IBM. Employers like that want any OT you do to be dedicated to THEIR endeavor, not somebody else's...even your own.
If you're able and willing to code in your off-time, you should be doing it for the good of the Company. /s
Yeah sure, and if you like I can also clean the bathrooms because I know how to do it...
Off-time is for your own not for your company regardless off what you do with it.
Having worked at IBM for 10 years, this is what I have come to know how IBM operates top-down:
1. To make significant profits, we need to sell services on top of our software products (this is essentially GBS and their "strong" sales people)
2. To make very good profits, we need to make highly customizable software (for example AI and BI offerings).
3. To make even more profit we need to make sure the software is tuned to the hardware we make.
If one of those weakens the entire IBM portfolio and profits weaken dramatically.
Here's problems in last 7 years tho:
1. People moving to the cloud so the hardware business flatlines.
2. Because people moved to the cloud they found replacements to IBM software.
3. At the end of the day IBM is forced to deliver professional services on top of other companies' software and hardware (and services employees are not cheap).
At some point the IBM execs must have had an epiphany that their AI offerings don't sell because they don't have a platform that sells other commodity cloud services on top of which AI components can be sold as high-priced addons.
So thus IBM decided to do what it does best --- take control of the entire stack.
With this acquisition IBM has the potential to become a next gen. cloud vendor. For example IBM has been trying to sell Bluemix as a hybrid PaaS/IaaS but haven't been very successful. The engineering team in Bluemix is weak and one way to really up the ante is getting access to top talent in the industry to do this (CoreOS team, Openshift.io team, linux kernel devs, distributed storage devs).
What's not clear here is that why would one company, which is dong pretty well, better every year, would want to be sold to another company, which doesn't look well (from your own description), instead of just continuing growing and eventually "winning" the cloud market by themselves? Is that just because top Red Hat people wanted to cash out more quickly?
Maybe because IBM would have provided a superior price, and RedHat is a public company answerable to shareholders.
Let's take reality, RedHat is still a small player compared to Amazon, Microsoft or Google. They don't have the bandwidth to compete on all the additional hosted services offerings. By partnering with IBM, they get access to IBMs entire suite of enterprise customers and hosted products, making them a serious competitor to the 3 big players instead of being a "me too, cloud". They could make it big together, looking optimistically. But it's on IBM to not screw this up.
redhat was trading at around $120 last week and IBM announced "Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion."
That $120 was really high for redhat, who just crossed the $100/share price last year. (unless you count year 2000/dotcom-IPO-madness) RHT's market cap was previously $20B.
Guys, this is not just, or mainly not RH Linux. :(
- kernel development
- Ansible
- JBoss (I know HN hates Java, especially Java EE, but it was and is an important factor in enterprise OSS adoption)
- OpenShift
- Ceph, Gluster
All these are in danger, not just RHEL. I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS. Canonical is way behind Red Hat in terms of revenue (1/20).
I don't know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS.
Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they're not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.
WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.
Is openshift really open source? I was under the impression that nobody really runs origin on its own since it's far too hard. It seemed more like they just wanted to point out but it's open source, but you need support and a lot of know-how to actually use it.
It seems to me that Red Hat is based on Fedora. Fedora being the fast release gratis community version and Red Hat the slow release commercial corporate version.
Then CentOS would the community gratis version of Red Hat.
Also with RH's recent acquisition of CoreOS, that suite will also be in IBM's arena.
I work for "a corporate". We used to be big IBM shops (AIX, IBM Java, websphere, etc, etc...). But AIX is now hardly used and neither is websphere. It's mostly off the shelf k8s, wildfly and other open source projects deployed on RHEL (not my personal favorite since its kernel is way behind the times).
I think this is IBMs way of playing catch up in the arena. I worry how they will handle entrenched "political interests" - e.g. Webpshere/AIX/etc.. and the more open source friendly RedHat suite. Pretty sure its going to be one big mess in a few years time.
They _did_ pay a lot of money to acquire them, so there's a reason to believe they're committed to fully integrating RH technology. Considering Jim, who certainly has an interest in the survival of open source software, signed this off also gives some hope.
The OpenShift folks sit on a ton of critical posts in the Kubernetes project. I'd suspect this is what IBM wants, but it's a risk that they stop contributing to the open source project.
It goes much deeper than that, Red Hat maintains or contributes regularly to a wide swath of the Linux ecosystem. They also have a policy of open sourcing acquisitions. If the deal goes through, it's a dark day for open source software.
Red Hat's Open Source only approach does mean that none of these projects can be closed down, though: AFAIK, IBM are acquiring people and a brand, but no significant proprietary IP. If higher-ups at IBM turn out to be as clueless as Oracle, then key engineers will just walk and continue working on those projects elsewhere.
Where elsewhere? The landscape of options to be paid for your OSS has just become a barren field.
Yes, OSS as a concept can survive only on gratis work. However I'm not sure the portfolio of projects supported largely by Red Hat maintainers could. If maintainers are forced to start walking as they did with Oracle I expect to see quite a few projects fall into disrepair.
Pivotal is probably next in line for size for independent enterprise OSS but still a fraction the size of Red Hat, at under $1b in revenue. And some proprietary bits.
Super pessimistic point of view. Why do you think these are all in danger? These are things that people and more importantly enterprises use. Why would IBM ruin that?
> I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS.
Doesnt Microsoft tick all those boxes? Even if they aren't exclusively an open source company, they are "absolutely behind OSS" if you go by how much open source code they have contributed.
How on earth is Microsoft "absolutely" behind OSS? Which of their main products is Open Source? Windows? Office? SQL Server? Azure? Exchange? What exactly makes Microsoft a company "absolutely behind OSS?"
Their stupid boot loader still ignores any other operating system for god's sake.
Kudos to people at Microsoft's Marketing and "developer relations" department who won the hearts of developers by allowing TypeScript and VSCode to be FOSS. Suddenly MS is "Absolutely behind OSS".
Meh. They have a bad reputation due to calling open word source software cancer the new windows business model.
Also, while their engineers are certainly smart, their software seems very crusty (the down side of infinite backwards compatibility) and usually doesn't play well at all with existing open source software. Thus: Mostly useless.
When I worked for IBM (via acquisition), I wanted to fix bugs in Cygwin (owned by Red Hat). Red Hat does not accept patches unless you get permission from your current employer. I could not get anybody in IBM to sign Red Hat's permission slip. Nobody would sign because it's all risk, no reward from IBM's point of view.
I have the same problem in academia, being in a non-CS department, I'm required to notify the University's Center for Technology & Venture Commercialization about assigning my copyright over software to another entity (like the FSF), but so far I have been unsuccessful at getting them to sign the letter the FSF wants, despite the code I would be contributing being completely outside of my work at the University and so therefore theoretically outside of their purview. I suppose the moral is that all large organisations converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/hour employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.
Come to Sweden then :) As a researcher you explicitly own the rights to any foreground, i.e. results, as stated by law — the so called teacher’s excemption.
> I suppose the moral is that all large organisations converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/hour employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.
All large organizations have a decent amount of bureaucracy around copyright and IP, but the difference is good ones make it easy and straightforward for employees to go through that process.
Google, for example, has a well-documented and clear process for contributing to open source software (both in work hours and in personal time): https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/
I totally understand that large organisations don't want to sign papers about things that are none of their business. It's ridiculous that they need to sign them. This shouldn't be a requirement for Open Source contributions. But with some businesses claiming their employees' unrelated work done in their free time, I can see how this has become a necessity.
It's harmful for open source, and a terrible situation that's not to anyone's benefit. I guess US law should make more clear that employers don't own their employees' private work?
This is also a major obstacle towards open science, and one that the open science community seems generally unaware of. Every day there seems to be another journal article extolling the virtues of data-sharing and imploring other researchers to share, but very few folks seem to treat the elephant in the room, which is that universities have no motivation to allow their researchers to release data for free and potentially relinquish valuable IP.
I'm a current IBMer, and there is a process for getting CLAs signed - it's a bit bureaucratic if it's not a CLA for a company we already work with, but otherwise IBM has no problems with contributing to projects like that.
I left IBM a few months ago, but I led a bunch of developer advocacy efforts for a couple years.
There are several internal programs at IBM that enable employees to make contributions to open source with very little bureaucracy. Go to the intranet site w3.developer.ibm.com for details.
Deeply regrettable. One of my colleagues identified and fixed an issue with Duplicity while he was working on a backups subsystem for our server estate, and after a quick check with a Director I was able to sign off the work for release back to the Duplicity project.
This actually seems like fair policy to me, think of the mess Red Hat would be in if IBM decided that they had copyright on your contributions to Cygwin.
I think that, if you were to ask open source maintainers, "What would you think of me committing fraud to get around your project's policies?" most of them would say, "Thanks, but no thanks."
Honestly I probably would have just scribbled a name in a terrible hand writing (not hard for me anyways) and called it a day. They just wanted something on file that would never be looked at again.
I don't think in the short term this will be a problem. However IBM has lost it's way. its a very large unwieldy organisation that doesn't change very fast.
It also has an awful lot of lifers, who would flounder horribly outside the soft warm IBM shell.
But, there are some brilliant engineers and technologies that are inside IBM. The ones I know are about are to do with GPFS, which is a shining beacon compared to ceph and gluster.
A clever organisation _could_ mix GPFS, the vast experience with scheduling and resource allocation, and second to none documentation (have you read a Red book? they are marvels of readability.) to make a spectacular platform. One that unlike K8s would be easy to use, understand, tune, script for and run.
They won't be able to execute it properly, but they have the potential.
I definitely agree with you. I’ve been paid more or less to run GPFS over the last 15 years or so (finally free of it for the last few months), and while I hate it with a searing passion, a) it’s far better than the alternatives as long as you can afford it, and b) the people who lead and do the real work on the project are very, very bright. If they keep these people working on hard problems, they’ll do well. If they try to replace them with inexpensive staff, it will fall apart in months.
Parallel POSIX-compliant filesystems at scale are an astonishingly hard problem, and adding the feature set they have while keeping it relatively stable and performant is really worthy of admiration. Every one of the dozens of conversations I’ve had with their developers and technical leads have left me more impressed. They literally can’t test it internally at the scale that their large customers run it, but they’re really good at finding problems and pushing out hotfixes that work pretty well.
That said, if I never have to touch it again for as long as I live, I’ll be a very happy man. From an HPC perspective, I think we’re long past the scale where parallel filesystems should be POSIX-based.
At the risk of topic drift, I'm curious where the problems are with being parallel and POSIX-compliant. I'm at a point where I think I need to consider a parallel file system and I don't have much experience with them, so I'm not aware of the issues.
_most_ object storage is actually used as a pseudo filesystem (ie S3 et al) because a shared, fast & reliable filesystem are vanishingly rare.
Apart from openstack (and I've never seen a successful deployment of it outside of rackspace) most use cases I've seen involve either bolting on a NFS head, or some other filesystem to ceph and serving it publicly.
which is frankly not all that great. I like the _idea_ of ceph, but I don't want to have to support it. Like Nexenta, it seems great, but it soon hurts during crunch.
What I like about GPFS is that it allows you to join up large amounts of block storage, regardless of the underlying fabric.
Everything has a hook, so if a file has been created/updated/moved/deleted/metadata changed, you can attach a script to that action. There is an inbuilt HSM, which allows you to shuffle files about based on their content: raw footage? move it to the spinny disk array, final deliverables? move it to the storage based in the other country. File bigger than 1TB, and hasn't been touched in two weeks, sure you can kick it out on to tape.
crucially because its all one name space, the end user doesn't have to care about where the file is, the system takes care of that based on rules.
The best part is, there are no special tricks needed for the end program, its just standard file io.
However it is one global system, which is it's downside. for pure uptime its better to have an array of file servers, to limit the blast radius, but then you don't get the goodness
Lovely idea that won't be possible. All that brilliance and inspiring leadership from Red Hat will be overwhelmed by the tsunami if indifference that is IBM corporate culture. On the plus side, if you're looking to hire real OSS talent for your team, I suspect a bunch of Red Hat folks will be on the market as soon as their contractual lockups expire.
Ugh I hate their sales. There was a day they decided to spam my cell phone number constantly while I was on lunch. Not even sure how they got it, but I finally answered and got super angry with the other end. I didn’t even know it was Red Hat because they didn’t even bother leaving messages. Just back to back to back times 4 calls. Even if it were my work number, if you didn’t get through the first time, spamming my line isn’t going to get you there either.
Given that IBM are after the tech and will probably reject the culture (as also happened when Oracle ate Sun), I suggest an appropriate name would be...
That's a positive scenario but I don't see Ginni Rometty relinquishing control voluntarily. The IBM board has given no signs of dissatisfaction with her performance.
IBM is sliding into irrelevance in the mass market for sure, but they've still got a sizeable slice of the HPC/supercomputing market and their research in quantum computing is hard to overlook.
I work in HPC, and, well, it's VERY hard to make a good profit there.
- Customers are stingy (think academic labs, supercomputer centers etc.), are not typically married to your solution architecture so for every purchase they will put out a tender that you have to bid for and win.
- Performance is king, which means very expensive R&D, and customers don't spend much on all these "enterprise value-adds" that enterprise focused businesses use to pad their bottom lines.
> If IBM has one brain cell left, they'll pull a NeXT/Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company.
Honestly, I could see that happening and working out great .. for legacy IBM customers. But if you aren't an existing IBM mainframe/midrange shop, there will be only tangental benefits for you.
To go with your Jobs analogy, the original iMac was all about preserving legacy Mac users. The new customers had to come in from a different angle. Does either RedHat or IBM have the angle?
IBM is, as far a I can tell, the best example of a "mixed bag" in tech. I have heard both great and terrible things about IBM from customers, employees, developers on Open Source projects, etc. They are a huge organization, and one that seems more divided than many.
It may be more useful to view IBM as a collection of fiefdoms rather than a single, focused, entity. Yes, the money all goes into one pot at the end of the day, but there's large variance across organizations within IBM.
That said, from what I can tell OSS that goes into the IBM machine doesn't usually come out the other side improved. I worry for the health of CentOS/RHEL/Fedora under IBM's leadership. My desktop and server OS of choice, with a few brief forays into other territories along the way, has been from Red Hat for 23 years. I'd hate to lose Fedora or CentOS, or see them stagnate. Red Hat has been among the most steadfast in their support of Open Source software, as well...so, there's a real risk of the kernel, Gnome, and other OSS core infrastructure suffering, because Red Hat is a major contributor to those projects.
I don't think it'll be sudden. It usually takes years for projects to become clearly worse for having come under IBM's purview. Red Hat is large itself, and will probably take years to be fully assimilated and homogenized into IBM's lukewarm culture of mere competence with regard to their Open Source contributions.
On acquisitions, I can offer the anecdote of a friend working at a startup IBM purchased.
Things started with "IBM loves you, and pledges to stay hands off and help you do what you're already doing", continued to "We're going to replace a few management positions with folks from IBM" and "We're changing some benefits, titles, and procedures to better align with The IBM Way", and finally ended up with "You aren't meeting your sales targets, so we're going to overhaul your leadership."
Admittedly, this was a much smaller company than Red Hat. But they were profitable before being bought and had a respected product and growth.
Is "Cognitive Solutions" mainly their AI efforts? [1]
If that's the case, and given the terrible feedback they've received from many of their Watson customers (and anecdotes from people working on it)... I am tempted to say that the future is bleak for IBM, and that people will ultimately discover that they were paying a fortune for something that does not match what's advertised (they've put millions into advertising Watson with nonsensical ads)...
...but then again, many enterprise solutions that are incredibly over-engineered, slow and costly are still alive and kicking, so who knows.
Their iSeries service isn’t bad as soon as you get by the screening person whose grasp of English leaves a lot to be desired. Talking to one of their actual techs has solved everything I’ve asked. It does probably help that machine phones home when it needs parts replaced.
I don't have any contacts with IBM business-wise, so my question might sound naive: Why 90% services revenue would be a problem? They have to fund these R&D and open source contributions somehow.
Because literally every conversation turns into a services upsell.
I've migrated a site from WAS to JBoss. The support experience is night and day. WAS on IBM OS on IBM hardware not working? Pay a four-figure-per-day consult to be told that's just how WAS works on that platform, buy more hardware.
Same application on JBoss, problems with performance, RH dropped experts in as part of the support contract.
This is not a one-off in my experience. RH, Microsoft, other vendors I deal with treat a lot of these things as covered by your enterprise support contracts. IBM treat it as a chance to upsell a services engagement, and maybe pitch that the work should be outsourced, too.
Maybe for hardware. There are pretty good about hardware support. At two companies I worked at we got people sent to us for on-site repair.
Their software support is something else. I haven't had to use IBM tooling in a while, but back when I did, everything they sold was absolutely fucking terrible (DB2, RAD, WebSphere, Clear Case, Tivoli) compared to many open source equivalents.
The only reason people buy this rubbish is because they're in an old company (bank, insurance, etc.) that has relied on it for ages and don't care about the inefficiency or cost.
In my opinion: Either invest in developing hacker news support for updated news comment threads better (my recommendation is to split each thread by the original article/time in a megathread and use the newest title for the base merged thread and sort the sub-threads by time or stop merging these threads because it makes it so freaking confusing as the comments are based on totally different contexts and yet they are all intermingled.
Prime other example being the tesla going private thread which I think is this one but I'm not sure because the threads are so hacked together or duped I cannot find a hacker news link to the original tweet [0].
This happens whenever a story is changing rapidly. It doesn't have to do with merging the threads—it has to do with different comments dating from when different information was available. In this case the initial story was "might acquire" and then turned into "has acquired". The threads weren't neatly partitioned before we merged them; people just post to whichever discussion they happen to see.
When a story has been changing while the comments have been accumulating, HN readers are smart enough to figure it out, and I'm not sure adding new software would help much.
Ay ay ay... if this is true then everything from RH is gonna get fatter, slower and more expensive.
Add a bit of WebSphere here, a bit of Domino there and voila. It'll then be ready for 'resource action' (aka layoffs).
Jokes aside, RH is an engineer-focussed business - IBM is an accountant-focussed business. There's just NO way these two cultures are going to work well together.
It's like Vader asked Luke to join him in defeating the Emperor (Microsoft) and ruling the galaxy as father and son - and instead of the audience hearing "I'll never join you!!", we hear "sure, let's team up."
The cognitive dissonance is so strong here. WTF just happened? If you asked me a month ago to put down serious money in Vegas on this never happening, I'd have happily done so. What on Earth were they thinking?
IBM is basically taking it's failing Kubernetes distribution, saying "why lose when we can just buy the winners?", and went ahead and bought Red Hat and OpenShift instead. A year from now, we'll start to see heavy IBM integrations into OpenShift, radically increased licensing fees for RHEL to squeeze every penny out of enterprises which bought RHEL specifically because they need the support guarantees because they can't migrate away quickly, and every other Red Hat project - Ansible, Cockpit, Fedora, CentOS, etc., will get torn to pieces by IBM bean counters.
Ditto, I can almost guarantee I'll be in a meeting in the week or two where my directors will want to discuss the possibility of moving off of Redhat, at least as a contingency plan.
"Do not fall into the trap... of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison... If you put your hand inside a lawnmower, it will get chopped off. The lawnmower doesn't care... The lawnmower doesn't want to kill open source. The lawnmower just can't think about open source. The lawnmower can't have empathy."
The boilerplate and vague statement of Red Hat remaining a distinct unit doesn't really tell us anything. More relevant is what the CentOS and Fedora communities think of this acquisition, because no matter what they are community driven projects.
There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out.
I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.
Where’s the history of IBM buying and sun setting companies? I don’t have the same prejudice towards IBM that I do for Oracle. But I’m not in a position to know.
I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.
>Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere. Not because of this anyway. There were similar concerns around RH's acquisition (if that's what you call it) of CentOS a couple of years ago, but things have largely been the same. And it's mostly for selfish reasons. The overall dev mindshare of RH based systems has shrunk compared to Ubuntu. So anything that moves people away from Ubuntu to the RH ecosystem is net win because eventually some corp will write a check when they need support. It's the same idea as MS not going after pirates just to increase MS's overall market share.
RedHat is a public company, in what fantasy land do you exist where this isn't expected?
Furthermore, the deal is still subject to shareholder approval:
> The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat. It is subject to Red Hat shareholder approval. It also is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the latter half of 2019.
So you really should be complaining that RedHat's board of directors just sold out, and that's their fiduciary duty.
The Red Hat board were offered a massive premium on an already generously-priced stock. If they hadn't sold there probably would've been lawsuits left and right.
The deal is subject to shareholder approval. I think based on that approval, you'll be able to estimate how right or wrong you are about lawsuits had the board rejected the offer.
RHT is $20 billion in market cap as of Friday, and the offer is $34 billion.
SUSE has been acquired many times in the past several years (Novell, Attachmate, MicroFocus). In theory, EQT will help us "get back on our feet" in terms of self-sufficiency but how things will actually pan out is obviously still unclear.
Ubuntu (Canonical) just stared looking more attractive as they were trying to be an independent commercially-supported Linux offering.
Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.
This is sad, Fedora has been my favourite distribution for a little while. Red Hat have been a good community player and it is a big loss for them to be gobbled up by IBM. What is the best alternative to Fedora and CentOS?
But Red Hat/Fedora has been a huge contributor to very basic Linux ecosystem things which everyone benefits from, like the freedesktop standard stuff and more.
I wonder how this change will pan out across the entire Linux-sphere. I’m wondering and I’m trying not to be pessimistic.
IBM's had the Linux Technology Center (LTC) for a long time and has been contributing to the community. All the platforms Z, POWER etc... support Linux as a first class citizen and plenty of other ecosystems are also supported (i.e GCC, OpenJDK, etc...)
Maybe its time to re-evaluate the old biases? The old incumbents like Microsoft have warmed up to OSS, not sure why Big-Blue is getting this much flak.
Microsoft has been doing a lot to rebuild itself as a cloud provider.
IBM has been doing a lot to go out of business.
Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines.
IBM is a floating raft of failed leadership.
Microsoft isn't trusted fully by the community but they are making inroads under their new CEO.
IBM has been firing its most senior people in an effort to slow its cash burn and to hire younger folks. IBM also claims it's also to bring on folks with more relevant skills to emerging technologies. I think there is a lawsuit about this.
Anyway, IBM has done nothing in recent years to show they are a true contender.
If the Redhat team is able to pull a Next here and assume leadership roles inside of IBM this could be stellar. Big Blue's formidable sales team and reputation with a great product line overseen by passionate people would be powerful.
If the IBM existing leadership team emerges as the winners here it will likely continue to fade into irrelevance.
"Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines." this is not true? maybe you meant he's a technical adviser
Thing is, IBM does not have a great reputation for how it manages its staff as it tends to favour moving positions to low cost locations and redundancies that provide the minimum possible payouts
I've followed POWER for a while now, and it seems to be mostly marketing hype. The POWER8 was not much better than the Xeons out, and had almost no availability. POWER9 excels at a lot of IO-bound tasks, but again, it's nearly impossible to find. It doesn't help that there are very few systems you can buy out there. On paper, the POWER9 looks awesome. Then you look closer at the actual architecture and realize that a lot of pieces of the design are weird and/or seem somewhat useless. It also doesn't help that they're extremely expensive, especially since there are so few options.
So while I'd like IBM to compete with Intel, they need to pony up more money if they really want to push the industry. Don't make it so hard to buy one, and publish benchmarks/comparisons with Intel.
Based on your subcomment about evaluation, I'm very interested to hear your opinions about Talos' offerings - up to now I've only heard anecdotes from individuals drinking the security+ownership kool-aid.
What IBM offers is probably a lot more coherent and takes better advantage of what the POWER architecture has to offer, such as larger quantities of RAM, the per-node interconnect fabric, faster I/O (not just PCIe), etc (admittedly totally naive here). Plus of course there's z/OS, which I know enough about to respect (and want to play with someday :) ).
Talos basically offers only Linux and a mildly DIY standing-up experience (https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-rap...), although this is likely to be reasonably painless for non-desktop configurations (and perhaps volume orders can come preconfigured).
As a bit of a pet idea I kind of want to colocate one of the 2U or 4U systems for generic web serving and similar duties, but I fear that running a blog/discussion system on such a machine may result in a constant effort (on my part) at keeping discussion focused on the "it's a different architecture, what comp-sci interesting things can we do with it" aspect instead of getting distracted by shallow OCD-meta-security bikeshedding.
(It's kind of sad that the collective consensus about new/different architectures has to always be about security nowadays, and not about unbiased exploration, which is what we're best at)
My impression is that POWER is more suitable for certain types of scientific computation that require high degrees of precision rather than for general purpose enterprise use. POWER9 is the only CPU architecture out there that has support for quad-precision floats. Alas, no CPU exists with support for octuple floats, since only astrophysicists need that level of precision.
sir, you make a good point. the world always changes. microsoft has changed, perhaps IBM has also. one who believes in sin and redemption perhaps should give IBM a chance.
To add some substance to my comment. I’ve interacted with IBM in different scenarios. I’ve had to manage a team of IBM consultants at work, very frustrating experience. I still shed tears every time I think the hourly rate paid vs the value they provided. When Watson was being hipped the company I was working for was approached to use the tech and come up with some PoCs, the dissonance between the biz dev pitch and the actual “solution” was abismal. Currently I’m at a different company and we have IBM as one of our customers, the image that comes to mind is a headless chicken running around.
That is to say, not a very impressive impression. I’ve to say that I’ve seen some interesting stuff as well. But I’m still very sad about the buyout
IBM has been historically a Linux contributor. Eclipse, their open source IDE, opened the other to Java and other programming languages in the OS. And Power processors supported Linux early on. From that perspective to purchase Red Hat makes sense.
It makes even more sense as the announcement states that they are trying to create a bigger cloud provider to compete with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
My main concern is the reduction on variety. All big businesses are buying layer after layer of different markets reducing the number of options that one can choose.
According to their 10Q and 10K filings, IBM is over seventy percent a consultation business with less than ten percent of revenue being made from hardware.
So with RedHat and the remains of IBMs hardware division, they make a push into the cloud with their own RISC-V servers with chips fabbed on an advanced node and with a full software stack driven by both IBM and RedHat developers. They'd be vertical in their cloud offerings.
You don't need to tell me I'm hallucinating - I know. But it's fun to imagine something good coming from this rather than the simple destruction of RedHat.
"We expect OpenShift to become the dominant brand for Kubernetes."
That seems like a strong statement that I didn't see any backing for in the blog post. Care to expand? I haven't seen much settling in the k8s space. In fact it looks like things are still heating up with many companies pivoting in that direction.
You do realise that a lot of Linux kernel development is being done by for profit enterprises, don't you? None of these companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they have a vested interest. Linux is at the heart of possibly the majority of modern IT infrastructure.
Besides,IBM/RH are by not even the largest contributors. Intel does more than both of them combined, and then you have other heavyweights like Google who have an interest (notably through Android) in keeping the project going. Even if IBM were to pull out for some reason, there are more than enough others who could pick up the slack.
I see way too many good open source projects relying on donations, and they are not doing well. Nothing wrong with making money, or rather, it's an essential part of life (for better or worse).
It's worse, IMHO. IBM treats their customers as prey just like Oracle plus they treat their own people worse. I know people who've had the IBM licensing ninja squad show up at their door for surprise validation with a big bill as a result.
Oracle are actually malicious. IBM are just incompetent.
If you can find a good account manager inside IBM for your needs, then there is a chance that you'll be able to get on well. Otherwise you'll have to do what I did which is say publicly shame the head of department on a public platform, with their superiors listening in.
However nice their open source work is, RH licensing is already every bit as scummy as the others, at least if my coworkers in the department I used to work for are to be believed. Bait and switch freebies, "we need to run this sketchy shell script on your production system to determine how much money you owe us" nonsense, coming back with a ludicrously inaccurate bill that has to be argued over point-by-point with lawyers, the works.
When IBM bought Informix they replaced competent database support with aggressive DB2 marketing droids and presented us with an annual bill sixty times more than Informix had charged.
The alienate and destroy part is likely. Very different situations otherwise.
Sun was essentially a dead shell that still held a few valuable pieces when Oracle purchased them. Overall the business was in terminal decline.
Red Hat, while wildly overvalued (as many things are/were in this bubble market), has a consistently growing business that is on good footing overall.
Their prior four fiscal year sales figures: $1.7b, $2b, $2.4b, $2.9b
They look like they could do $3.4b in sales for fiscal 2019.
Their profitability is mildly lacking and combined with their modest growth doesn't come close to supporting their extreme valuation (much less when the stock was 50% higher). It's not surprising the board might sell the company here, the stock market bubble is likely nearing an end, with interest rates rising or a recession coming up next (either of which guarantee it's over). Red Hat may not see much higher than this market cap for another decade - assuming continued modest growth - if they were valued at a more sane level.
Red Hat is riding relatively high. Sun was on its last legs as an independent entity. Red Hat very clearly does not need to sell here, if they do it's simply the board taking what is an extraordinary price (would have to guess the deal will value them at 60 to 80 times idealized 2018 earnings).
There is also the big difference that Sun was in the middle of transitioning to open source company (almost begrudgingly I think after everything else had failed), they weren't the great friend of open source they now are remembered as at their peak of their success. Sun still held significant amount of proprietary IP when they were acquired. In comparison RH has been open source from the get go, and pretty much everything they have is open source.
RH strategy was mostly focused around OpenShift lately, which makes complete sense. Kubernetes is the next datacenter OS, just as ESX (and virtualization in general) was in the past 15 years and it's going to drive a radical shift in the enterprise IT world in the coming years. IBM (as an active member of the kubernetes community) see that huge opportunity and are doubling down on their efforts.
Any bets on the next player in this space to be acquired by an IT behemoth? Docker and Rancher both come to mind.
Docker just took more funding, so it'll likely be a while, but yeah I'd say they're very likely to get acquired in the medium - long term.
Rancher haven't raised in a couple of years, so might be more prone to acquisition in the short term.
In general it lseems likely that as containerization has taken off over the last couple of years , larger players who missed the boat will be looking to make acquisitions to become more relevant in that space.
Docker seems to be determined to strike it out on their own. The implications of Kubernetes takes time to materialize, and they might well sell too late.
New IBM hire, software developer. So far; I've taken part of 3 separate events where I was essentially sat through a presentation on why I should file patents (so they could farm IP off of me and my peers). IBM is a pathological company, and definitely not good news for open source.
”sat through a presentation on why I should file patents”
Some years ago, I worked for Red Hat. I remember them saying the same thing about patents. There was even some kind of reward scheme if you filed one with your name on it.
(in hindsight, I guess I should have held on to those employee stock options!)
I've seen RedHat (via JBoss) knowingly patent work they read in a research paper without referencing or funding them. I was positive it was for a reward, as there was no additionally novel ideas in their descriptions and similar work was already open sourced. I knew it wouldn't hold up so it didn't bother me as impacting my projects, but I was disappointed over the ethics of them doing that. I do wonder how many patent rewards are given for someone else's work by farming from the research community.
This is rather normal, not pathological. Most companies like to file patents, definitely including startups. Where do you think their patents come from, if not from work their employees do? It's work that's worth paying for.
Having some proprietary code doesn't prevent companies from also making substantial contributions to open source in other areas.
Having some proprietary code doesn't prevent companies from also making substantial contributions to open source in other areas.
... yes, but patents are not "proprietary code", in which case granting copyright is enough. If a private company contributes code I think it could even grant the copyright to an open organization, but still decide later to sue if the method/feature/function/etc is patented by them.
Not that I'd foresee IBM or any of the real players in the IT space attempting that anymore, I think most realize that alienating the F/OSS community isn't a viable strategy for a software services company in the long term.
actually, the normal advice for startups these days is to not file patents. They're expensive and pretty much useless. They used to be worthwhile because investors liked them, but investors aren't so hot on them any more (because expensive and usually indefensible).
Have you been enjoying the morale nothings-on-fire-we-swear propoganda all-hands meetings? I was in IBM, software dev, for a year - just left around July. God help your soul.
The joy of working in a large corp. One day it's: boss's boss cares a lot about the work of this team. The next day the whole project gets cancelled. All hands propaganda meetings are so much fun ;-)
Hi there! Fellow IBMer :) sorry to hear about your experience so far, just wanted to chime in and say that you're definitely not alone with this perspective. Patents at IBM are so highly valued that they often act as a blinder towards open source.
However, there are definitely groups inside of IBM that choose to open source their work instead of filing for patents. For example, the team that I'm currently on works on the Carbon Design System [0], which is entirely open source. All the work our team does is out in the open too [1][2], which is great!
I would say that for teams like this, the tendency is to open source software and patent processes that are unique to IBM or a particular domain. That way we can try and contribute back as much useful technology as we can!
Obviously there are others at the company who might have a different perspective, but thankfully we're also trying to spread our own take on alternatives to the traditional processes at IBM.
Hope this info can help make your time at IBM a little bit better!
> "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
Unfortunately, that's going to be the situation at virtually every large tech company these days. To their credit, IBM has been a longtime contributor to Linux so if Red Hat was going to be acquired, IBM is far from a worst-case scenario. It just would have been nice if they could have remained a stand-alone company (I know, wishful thinking)
Maybe you are new to the software industry but at every company I've seen e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft they strongly encourage you to be filing patents.
And calling it farming is a bit strange considering you're paid by the company to generate the IP in the first place. Plus they typically compensate you extra for it.
IBM pushed what I call reckless patenting. They explicitly said, in multiple situations, that even if you think that it's a trivial idea you should attempt to patent it as it will probably get through. Personally, that sentiment goes against my philosophy. I wouldn't regard the monetary benefit to filing a patent through IBM worth the guilt I would accrue.
Note that I haven't worked for other giant tech conglomerates, but I haven't experienced it in the other medium - large but not ridiculously large companies which I've worked for.
I am familiar with patent reward systems, but only IBM pushed what I call reckless patenting. They explicitly said, in multiple situations, that even if you think that it's a trivial idea you should attempt to patent it as it will probably get through.
The only reason for this is to up their patent arsenal.
Some companies are better then others. I am confused about why you would ask a question that is intellectually equivalent of "... have you stopped beating your wife.." /S
Did you expect this beforehand? I can imagine they try to show themselves as being innovative and stuff, and only after you join you get the company policy details on stuff like what you just mentioned.
As a Red Hat employee (opinions my own, not Red Hat's, etc) and though not involved in any discussions like this, I can see some potential for it being a good move. There's a lot of work being done to a) move things from mainframe to distributed and b) help people squeeze the last bits of utility out of their mainframes. That requires knowledge on both sides of the house.
The world is going to open-source distributed systems built on commodity hardware, which Red Hat has done a great job of building a business model around. For old established companies, though, the migration is a lot of work, and there are _definitely_ still plenty of large companies who have purchased/leased mainframes for long periods of time, and would like to modernize, but also can't afford to throw everything away and rebuild from scratch. There's a lot of work being done already between the two companies to run Go, Docker, Kubernetes, etc, on mainframe, and for companies with mainframe resources, being able to get a little more utility out of those sunk costs is very attractive, and something Red Hat's expertise has (and would continue to, presumably) help accomplish.
That being said, I'm pretty surprised at the news, and I'll be watching closely to see how things go.
This is the most positive comment I've seen in this thread. To the extent that the ensuing development effort finds bugs in container orchestration systems, creates new features, creates new abilities to manage services on "hybrid" private-cloud-plus-mainframe systems, helps to modernize old-school businesses that run infrastructure the global economy relies upon... this could actually be a very good thing for open source and future investment therein. Skepticism is healthy and warranted, but this could be a good match.
It's also worth pointing out that Red Hat (and Big Banks) have been desperately trying to train new mainframe operators with limited success due to the shift to distributed, to the extent that they've even been giving money to select colleges specifically to develop mainframe-centric curriculum.
I have some hopes that Red Hat has a strong-enough future value for IBM that we end up redefining IBM rather than the other way round. There are precedents, notably the Apple/NeXT merger. Today's Apple is 95% NeXT and 5% old Apple. Can this happen here? Time will tell.
An an IBM employee, I definitely hope that some of the RH culture rubs off on us, but I also hope that RH retains its own distinctive identity and isn't altered very much by the deal aside from having access to IBM's resources such as the scale of the sales organisation.
RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will experience vendor hate to a high degree. But, RH is based on open source. A replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.
Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Every new cloud thing touted its pre-configured Ubuntu images, for example. Even Microsoft started with Ubuntu with WSL.
Maybe that's why a still multi-billion dollar company decided to cash out even as Linux seems to be making inroads. People used Red Hat for the same reason they used IBM: it was corporate, understood corporate needs, and knew how to serve them. Now it seems like corporations are offloading IT to AWS and friends with Ubuntu.
Everyone talks about what Canonical did for the desktop while missing what they did for friendly apt-based Linux on the server with SLAs and LTSes and support contracts from a company that speaks corporation.
And if all the paying customers switch to Debian-based distributions...
RH back in the day made a lot of hay by being the go-to option for enterprises migrating proprietary UNIX workloads to x86+Linux. But I guess that market is mostly saturated by now.
What I worry about is not the fate of RHEL per se, in the end it's just a distro among others. What I worry about, as a huge FOSS fan, is the fate of RH engineering which is certainly one of the biggest individual upstream FOSS contributors on a lot of places in the stack. By comparison, the Canonical engineering team is absolutely puny. If the work that RH does disappears, we're going to see a lot slower progress in the FOSS ecosystem.
You'll see a lot of preconfigured CentOS images, not RHEL because of the licensing. Red Hat's recent (and sensible) play has been on-prem Kubernetes with OpenShift.
Well yeah, there's CentOS, so a company just needs to step up and provide the level of support RHEL customers expect.
I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in.
RHEL is just a small piece of the Red Hat puzzle that is sold to enterprises. In some way Red Hat is an exception -- there have been no multi-billion dollar businesses built purely on open source except them. (Or maybe I have missed something.)
Well, fuck. I spent the last couple of years completely revamping my UNIX support group. I got rid of all the weak SAs and used a mix of in person and online vendor training plus internal challenges to elevate everyone's skills. We were able to completely repurpose the "Level 3" UNIX engineering group because all the "Level 2" guys no longer needed to escalate to Level 3 for anything.
Critical to that was buying RedHat Learning Subscription and pushing my top guys through RedHat's Certified Architect program. But I'm skeptical but we'd have the same leverage to obtain similar learning discounts from IBM.
Honestly as my org gets more comfortable with pure open source solutions it may be time to just consider Fedora instead, particularly as our workloads are moving from bare metal to VMs to containers it arguably means less and less where the app is hosted anyway.
In the end it may mean RHEL going the way of Solaris as ever dearer license fees combined with a drop in support quality undermines their value proposition.
But I guess that's a problem for the next guy; my org transformation is done so I took a job doing provisioning using Terraform.
This was to be expected. Red Hat had no future as an independent company. Their flagship product RHEL still dominates their revenue 20 years later... But they have already saturated the enterprise Linux server market, and that market is in decline. All attempts to diversify have failed. Openshift and Ansible have potential, but compared to the decline of their core business, it’s too little too late. The current CEO is a peacetime CEO: he managed a successful business competently in fair wheather, but is not fit to navigate the rough seas ahead. This allows him to leave on a victory (“the largest software acquisition ever!”) and go on a book tour or something. Meanwhile IBM can delude themselves a few more years until they’ve finished milking Red Hat’s products for easy growth. Then they will have to face the reality of their situation: they have no real answer to Big Cloud eating their lunch. For now, though, they can pretend this is it.
This is a massive cash expenditure. IBM's biggest bet to be back into the cloud game. Given the amount of cash involved this might be IBM's last card, at least from an M&A perspective, so this deal needs to work.
RedHat is much smaller than IBM, however far better managed with a clear product roadmap, lean sales and customer support. In a good scenario a reverse takeover will take place and RedHat management will take control and lead new IBM to a better future, however this is very unlikely.
IMO: This is great for RedHat shareholders, terrible for the new IBM co...
I'm a fan of Red Hat. I am a Red Hat Certified Engineer and contemplating working towards the architect certification. When I heard they aquired the company behind Ansible a few years ago I was excited.
If this deal goes through I'll be super disappointed.
At a former employer, we were heavily invested in Purify, Quantify et al. When taken over by IBM, the license management cost at our side increased an order of magnitude -- not for the products per se but by the administration of the licenses.
Even though we loved the products, we found it was increasingly not worth it. 'Killed by license management', has a nice ring to it :)
Thanks to CoreOS and all the other teams under RedHat who have done amazing work up until now. To be fair I've used (and enjoyed/been impressed by) your software for free so obviously I'm not owed anything but I'm gonna be looking for alternatives.
I'm suuuuuuuuuper glad I jumped off of CoreOS Container Linux earlier after the acquisition by RedHat and subsequent bundling into Project Atomic. I avoided OpenShift all together for other reasons, mostly complexity. Now I can watch from a relatively relaxed standpoint and start figuring out how to make sure no IBM sneaks into my stack, if they start tanking products. As others have noted, this is more than RHEL. Keep in mind:
- Ansible is GPLv3
- CephFS is GPLv2 w/ some mix of BSD and others
I assume licenses will serve as a canary for when things start shifting. I might even be so bold as to predict some variation of the LICENSE + PATENTS.md clause.
Red Hat does not have CLAs, not does it own all the copyright, on either Ansible or Ceph. It cannot change their licenses unilaterally, that can only happen with permissive (non-copyleft) terms.
Yes, this is true right now, but does not mean it will be true in the future -- I meant to imply that Ansible was the safest, due to it's GPLv3 licensing (from what I understand GPLv2 is more permissive).
My second point was that I expect those terms to change depending on how IBM moves forward, and movement on that front (from the current state of things) should act as a canary.
Hoping this is false! IBM is the worst of acquirers and they treat their people like utter garbage, especially the more experienced ones.
If there's any truth to this, it means those in charge have basically given up - assuming growth is capped and/or that the big return of a buyout premium would counter recent stock pricing setbacks.
My perception is that IBM (and HP, Oracle, etc) will buy a product company, and then IBM-ify it, and then just sit on that product for years with minimal improvements.
That is my fear for Red Hat. Successful product companies are hungry - IBM is not.
They didn't fire theirs - they ordered them to move to an arbitrary office, most commonly not the closest geographically either, without relocation money. If you didn't move, it was considered a voluntary departure. There was often no room at these offices even for the minority who accepted the moves.
It was/is a deliberate attempt to dispose of senior, less portable people without having to pay layoff charges.
Who needs fusion power when you can run off the Watsons spinning in their graves at relativistic velocity?
I've really got to wonder at the people who would stay at a company that treated them like utter garbage ... especially if they're experienced ... and especially in this job market.
Red Hat tends to employ people through offices in low/moderate COL areas or as fully remote. It would have been my #1 prospect after leaving the Bay Area. People who've already established lives in places like Raleigh may not find a comparable job so easily.
Yes but which company's leadership has given up? If this is the ordinary acquisition model, where the buying company (IBM) leadership stays in charge, then I say it's Red Hat's leadership that's given up. If it's the 'buy a company to get an entirely new leadership team' then it means those in charge of IBM might actually understand their dire situation. But I have no idea if they have that awareness.
Actually Red Hat is exactly like IBM. Huge and slow.
I know the contribution to FOSS from Red Hat is great and all, but their product, RHEL, was a cancer for a modern software development.
Just easier to maintain for sysadmins doesn't make enough excuse for really long release cycle and the worst of all is they keep supporting the old products.
The result is a nightmare development environment for all the programmers who has to workaround the old bugs that was fixed years ago in the upstream but not fixed in the RHEL packages, but they have to use the RHEL packaged software for stupid sysadmin reasons.
What's the alternative? All of the places I've worked that used Red Hat never explicitly looked at the Red Hat support timeline. They looked at their business, the software they used, the features they needed, and based their upgrade cycles around that. They'd only upgrade the major versions of their primary software when a project would benefit and skipped major updates that were problematic. At my current job they're only now upgrading from a 2016 piece of software to 2018, they're also straddling Cent 6.7 and Cent 7.2 and only making moderate progress.
Usually the reason for updating the OS is because new software doesn't run, there's a major feature needed, or supporting the old OS is too much trouble.
But it's not like it's any different on the Windows side. XP stuck around forever. At my previous job they had Win7 on workstations with little to no intention of updating to Win10. On the server side it was all over the place including Windows Server 2003.
By using the obsolete software versions, it cause instability and inconsistency and a lot of effort will be wasted to workaround the issue rather than solving the real problem.
Totally agree. RHEL's support windows are FAR too long and result in more problems than they solve. Large businesses wait till the last minute to upgrade then realize that working through a minimum of 5 years (often 10) of changes is extremely hard. This means that you often run unsupported while everyone scrambles to fix all the changes introduced by the upgrade. Cannonical's 5 year support window is much more sensible.
For individuals and small businesses, sure it makes no sense. But large enterprise customers will pay a lot of money for support windows that are far too long. That's why Red Hat (and every other large company) offers them. Even when the publicly available support ends, they still often have hangers-on who will pay even more money to get a few more years support out of them.
Having been a linux user for 20 years now, I'm not worried.
Mostly because in the OS market there is enough competition that didn't exist back in the 1990's when RedHat was founded around the Linux kernel. And we continue to have valid choices in the Linux market.
And as we move forward into Kubernetes, we're looking at lightweight OS's to host a single purpose microservice. Most companies don't really need the full features that a full-service Linux OS offers anymore.
Another example of this trend is the declining use of Sendmail and it's alternatives. There are much better ways of handling email now than using Sendmail. Yes, it too was popular in the 1990's, and while people still use it, it's more likely for startups to use something like gmail for employee email, because it's just painless.
Agreed. There has been a massive amount of tech consolidation happening lately. I assume as a result of all that overseas cash that got repatriated with the tax changes.
At the same time, K8S team has been rapidly standardizing everything and turning it into a very modular system. etcd is pretty much a "done" project, but if it ever goes bad, it can easily be replaced.
Red hat has been owned by corporate execs, it's not owned by developers. Made 2.9 billion in 2017. Once that kind of money flows the big offers come from the oligarchs. There is no integrity in corporate business. If they get a big offer, they're going to sell. IBM in a proper world of business shouldn't exist, but patents keep them alive. We will need a new replacement to red hat, but I'm afraid the hyper reliance and patenting IBM will enforce will make this impossible.
Am I the only one cautiously optimistic about this merger? RH has dominated Linux development for too long anyway, pushing systemd, namespaces, procfs and other crap, and making RHEL an overcomplicated jack-of-all-trades O/S which would only run with the specific gcc, glibc, and RH-specific kernel patches and build tools anyway (which is kind of the point of RHEL, and of IBM as well - PTF466735 anyone?). RH now being IBM will make people turn to Debian and derivatives such as Ubuntu and Devuan. The press release on redhat.com talks almost exclusively about "the cloud", but "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together). Why would indie devs and idealists want to contribute their efforts to enslaving people in "the cloud" anyway? "Cloud" stuff is also at odds with user freedom, and only seeks to make software runnable over shitty web frontends for undue profit and privacy invasion, when F/OSS software has been out there in abundance for over a decade. I hope we'll also see some love for the BSDs, and a renewed shared understanding that only POSIX and other standards guarantee long-term autonomy to both individuals and corporations alike.
> "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together)
Does the physical hardware being on the actual premises or not really have anything to do with "site autonomy" or the granularity of the toolchains?
In fact, can you even buy any viable physical hardware to run on your site that's not already a virtualised "cloud" with the real host OS firmly in the control of your corporate overlords, e.g. Intel ME and AMD PSP?
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the cloud is not simply 'server hosting' because, if that was the case we'd still be calling them VPS'.
"The cloud" is a set of APIs for provisioning but also a bunch of managed services that surround your instances, pub/sub, DNS, load balancers, managed SQL. All of this is almost designed to be a vendor lock-in.
However, disregarding the vendor lock-in: How does my OS integrating with AWS's APIs help my on-prem services?
RedHat does a great job of being a trusted advisor for companies. Their people are often embedded at customers and are the first stop to ask for advise on anything related to Linux.
Recently RedHat was transitioning from selling the VM based RHEL to the cloud native OpenShift. They used the relationship they had with customers already using RHEL to 'up-sell' them to OpenShift.
IBM already had a SaaS offering for Kubernetes in https://www.ibm.com/cloud/container-service and RedHat adds a strong self-managed offering for Kubernetes in the form of OpenShift.
IBMs revenue comes from consulting but a lot of their profit comes from software https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-split-between-IT-and-consu... They are also a trusted advisor and are great at closing large and complex purchases. This move will allow IBM to sell more software products and therefore increase their margins.
I have a lot of respect for RedHats policy to open source all the software they sell. I expect that policy to continue.
I admire Red Hat as a company for their principled and uncompromising stance on open source. I contribute to many Red Hat open source projects and even promote their products, because they share my values. Their success directly contributes to the open source ecosystem in many ways, and they have a history of doing the right thing (tm).
I'm not sure how I feel about doing the same thing for IBM.
This is either very good news, or very bad. If Red Hat can truly remain independent and preserve their culture and values, they can achieve a lot more with IBM's money, and hopefully change IBM for the better.
If the culture changes for the worse, it's the end. Many, many people work at Red Hat because of the culture, not the pay (which is average), not to mention community contributors. This is particularly true for their top-tier engineers.
Red Hat's leadership is acutely aware of this, so I'm optimistic.
I can only imagine the discussions going on on their internal mailing lists. Friends of mine who are RH employees have fun stories to tell about epic discussions about much more inconsequential decisions :-)
I grieve the most that this will really weaken the argument for commercial free software. We could always say, look at Red Hat, they don't sell a drop of non-free software. It's possible to be free and commercial!
I doubt Red Hat will continue to operate this way, especially if they are receiving money from IBM's other ventures. I hope there's room for another Red Hat in this world.
> ... When the transaction closes, as I noted above, [Red Hat] will be a distinct unit within IBM and I will report directly to [IBM chair, president, and CEO] Ginni [Rometty].
Assuming RedHat was in a 'sell or die' situation[1] I'm glad it was IBM that stepped in rather than Oracle.
[1] I have no reason to believe that it was a dire situation at RedHat, I make the observation that companies that are meeting their goals and doing what they want, don't generally get acquired just because.
If it was a sell-or-die situation IBM wouldn't have offered such a hefty markup over the market price and they would have used less cash and more shares to pay for it.
I think it's been obvious to everyone for a year or two that someone was going to buy Red Hat; I feel that no small part of their share price rising over the last 18 months has priced in that expectation.
Like everyone else I am mostly pleased that they didn't get bought by Oracle.
Disclosure: I work for a competing company, Pivotal, so feel free to treat my observations as motivated by ... I dunno, actually. I'm looking for a cool French word here but "ennui" isn't quite fitting.
I use Fedora Linux on my laptop. What does this mean for the Fedora Project? Any thoughts on an alternate OS with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora? It takes about 1 GB to boot up Fedora 27 now.
Ubuntu, Debian, Arch? (Or Endless if you want something OSTree/Flatpak-based like Fedora Silverblue.)
> with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora?
Anything not GNOME? Not being (too) snarky — GNOME uses a lot of memory, although I've read they're making some progress recently. Even KDE these days is pretty low in memory usage by default.
NixOS maybe? Don't know about memory footprint, but as a fellow fedora laptop user, I find this distro the most appealing to switch to (arch being the other option, but too high maintenance for my taste).
NixOS is interesting but certainly not the easiest migration, it's a very different way of administering your system. That said, this might be what I chose to do now.
As for alternate Linux distributions, I don't know how similar you want to stay to Fedora, but my current setup would surely conform to your stated requirements: Arch linux, with i3 as window manager. I use st as my terminal emulator. All together, the memory footprint is minimal, and it makes my not-all-that-low laptop specs shine far more than a heavier distribution would have.
If you want something similar to Fedora, dunno. I believe the desktop interface is a big part of the memory usage of most distributions, so unless I'm mistaken in that, wanting low memory usage as well as a nice interface is going to be difficult.
Why not consider Open or NetBSD? They can make nice desktops, and OpenBSD is very friendly on laptops. And they are lighter than Fedora and perform much better. And, they use a maximally free license, but this is simply my preference. You may feel different.
Now I wonder who will buy Canonical. If/when Shuttleworth will be tired of running it I assume it also will happen. Maybe Microsoft to continue their open-source hat-trick.
Remember when NeXT bought Apple with Apple's money? If there's meaningful Red Hat leadership being put at the helm at IBM as part of the deal, it might not be hideous news. But if it's the usual acquisition, well I cannot imagine more incompatible cultures than IBM and Red Hat, integration seems very unlikely.
"IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community
Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team"
I guess this was an important part of the deal, otherwise it wouldn't make much sense.
I am worried about the future of the numerous Open Source projects. I mean, why did they sell RedHat? The bet on OpenShift does not seem to pay off then. I always saw RedHat as the "enterprisy" OSS company that helps moving all these Java monoliths to the cloud. Even more problematic is the influence this aquisition has on the landscape of OSS in the cloud space, especially since CoreOS, RHEL and CentOS are now run by IBM.
Many companies are OSS friendly, but I think being OSS friendly is different than building your whole organization on OSS. RH does the latter, many-many companies are the former.
"IBM further says, "Upon closing of the acquisition, Red Hat will join IBM's Hybrid Cloud team as a distinct unit, preserving the independence and neutrality of Red Hat's open source development heritage and commitment, current product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, and unique development culture. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat's current management team. Jim Whitehurst also will join IBM's senior management team and report to Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat's headquarters, facilities, brands and practices.""
In other words, RH is too big to merge quickly. When it's all said and done (in at most 3 years), expect a new post talking about "increased synergy" where RH will go through major a reorg to be merged into the borg.
To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it.
RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn't necessarily open, and it's not yet really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)
OpenBMC is worked on by the OzLabs group (which is the core of some of their mainframe BMCs), as well as lots of work around POWER9 and s390. Don't get me wrong, they are a proprietary shop at the end of the day, but they do an incredible amount of free software work.
And they also do several contributions, e.g. openstack, linux kernel
I would agree that IBM is not pop enough and that their motivation is usually not based on ideals or a social contract.
EDIT: I forgot IBM Blockchain, which you might think it is not "core" just because the company is still divided between areas like services, consulting and hardware...
The only remaining question to know is how many layers of shit, unnecessary complexity will IBM add on top of the preexisting shit, unneccesary layers already added by Red Hat on their products.
simple software that’s easy to use is anathema to companies like red hat. to the extent you can keep software simple, you won’t need red hat, pivotal, etc. these support companies have every incentive to make you dependent on them. think about that next time you reach for one of the technologies they peddle.
IBM like Redhat is a long time contributor and both are commercial companies driven by profits and shareholders so this does not change things.
However no one can deny Redhat has a disproportional influence in pushing its interests that may not always be in the community's best interests. These now move to IBM.
The bigger problem is the growing tilt of open source towards corporate interests so much so that dependence on individual companies passes without notice or scrutiny.
This is perhaps not the end result that motivated the initial community of open source contributors over the last 20 years and if we do not find ways to motivate the next generation open source will likely become a shell of itself, propped up by paid contributors and self interest.
Where do you see any of that represented in Red Hat's business performance? Their growth has been strong the last five years and shows no sign of high stress or decline being imminent. They're tracking to solidly double their sales over four years from the end of fiscal 2015.
I think when you figure out why Amazon is currently losing to Microsoft you will also understand why Red Hat, just like Docker, was completely crushed by Google, and why IBM, despite trying super hard, wasn't even a player until now.
Talking about procrastination I see a big problem for us user of FOSS desktop: RH need to be on GNU/Linux desktop just to play a SUN-like role. IBM have no need for that.
So after Ubuntu ditch desktop and actual "Gnome disaster" I think things will go even worse, leaving us with no more generic GNU/Linux desktop for end-users, pushing us again on a small tech/geek niche, witch in turn push end-users, many "power users" included, to the cloud-mobile world so delete the last bastion of digital freedom we have. On desktop we have our system, we control our files, we decide when and how to upgrade, what to install or uninstall. On mobile vendor choose for us and we are powerless.
For those of us running Red Hat or Fedora on IBM POWER, though (I run Fedora 28 on a Talos II), this is probably a good sign of future commitment. Hopefully they don't screw up Fedora maintaining the enterprise side.
Just using it as a big workstation. Firefox, Krita, LibreOffice. The software has improved to the point where it can realistically be a daily driver (that can also compile Firefox at -j24 on this octocore SMT-4 machine in about a half hour).
Every aquisition I've been a part of immediately resulted in a massive brain drain as everyone who made the aquired company great jumps ship. I wonder if Redhat's competitors are licking their chops.
This affects on so many open source projects in addition to RHEL. ANSIBLE, Ceph, OpenShift, Linux kernel, JBoss as well as everything Red Hat acquired from CoreOS.
Honestly? I think IBM isn’t as relevant as they’d like to be, so they’re buying a Nike. They haven’t thought about the details, or worked out the long term. It could still go either way, but RH will chamge some over time. The real problem will probably be the perception, largely thanks to Oracle and it’s behavior with Sun. Does make you wonder if open source is a sustainable business model in the ultra-long-term.
I haven't made it through all of the comments on this thread yet but, in case it hasn't been mentioned, HN'ers who are using AWS may be interested in knowing that, Amazon Linux (i.e., the official Amazon Linux AMIs) also appears to mostly be a clone of RHEL.
I can't be certain as I've just barely played with it but, from first appearances, it sure seemed very similar to RHEL and CentOS!
I don't know if AWS is starting with RHEL and rebuilding everything from source and "re-branding" it like CentOS does or if they're starting with CentOS and then rebuilding and rebranding that -- or perhaps I'm completely incorrect and they aren't doing anything of the sort -- but any future changes or decisions (by IBM/Red Hat) that impact the development or future existence of CentOS could very well affect the future of Amazon Linux as well.
That's certainly something to think about if you use the Amazon Linux distribution, just like I -- and, I imagine, a ton of other CentOS users -- am wondering right now about the future of CentOS.
The good thing is that IBM is old and slow and any decisions that might affect the future existence of CentOS will likely take a few years to actually be realized. By that I mean that I don't think we'll see 7.x affected by this acquisition -- or probably even the first couple of point releases of CentOS 8 -- but, at this point, it's anybody's guess whether 8 will live out its normal/expected lifetime and still be around 10 years after release.
As a side note, recently I've been thinking that an announcement of the release of 8.0 should be arriving any day now. I'm kinda curious if this acquisition has affected (delayed) the release of 8.0 in any way.
At this point, Microsoft might as well do its own Debian-based distro. What would they need from Canonical, really? Experienced people? I suspect it'd be much cheaper to pull a Hejlsberg with them.
RMS is usually eminently practical and pragmatic. Since this has not caused any practical change yet, there is nothing to comment on – it’s all speculation, and RMS usually does not speculate.
Microsoft would have actually been better. They're at least still a product development company. IBM at this point is just consultants and their sales ilk. They'll gut Red hat.
Half a year ago I was still at RedHat, and we were joking around with colleagues, that either the big bet on OpenShift/kubernetes starts paying off, or somebody buys us.
We joked that Microsoft under Satya Nadella would actually be quite a good fit :D
My main worry is that this will end up like the Novell acquisition of SUSE. 10 years on and there is still scar tissue running through SUSE and openSUSE. Lots of bad blood was stirred up (and in many ways this is what cause the drop in interest in SUSE). IBM has hardly had the best history when it comes to treating its acquisitions (or its employees for that matter).
On the other hand, I know quite a few folks who work for IBM and do great free software work. I want to think that RedHat would be treated like OzLabs -- a fairly isolated group that gets to continue working on all of the free software work they have always done.
Here's hoping it works out. The survival of RedHat (or any large free software company) is very important to the longevity of the projects that we all depend on.
[I work at SUSE, though I wasn't around during the Novell years I have heard plenty of horror stories. And I've used GroupWise.]
The BSDs are all open source and not tied to anyone. Since operating systems are literally key components of being free, this truly matters. Red Hat had too much of a grip on Linux (kernel), the userland and much more. systemd, while an atrocity on its own, has now become a requirement for certain userland software projects, which is heresy. So much for the tenet of a software program doing one thing well.
Unless I'm mistaken, almost all of open source is driven by corporate development. The linux kernel is an alright example: roughly 85% of development seems to be sponsored by a corporation[1]. I felt a little weird when I first learned that
The problem being that forked projects rarely get much traction. Look at Devuan. Only the very hard core Debian fanboys moved over. Sure, it's nice not having systemd, but the project will never have the user base and developer support that its parent project enjoys. Maybe, though, with RH being bought out, people will take a second look. I've always favoured Debian over RH for servers, as the upgrade path is dead simple and almost always works. RH/CentOS is a tough row to hoe in this regard comparitively.
Here's my take since we're all weighing in and are all in different levels of shock: IBM needs Redhat to stay relevant. The way I think about it is in a few ways. 1) IBM's stock price has been tanking because I think they're not investing in new products but just cutting expenditures to meet stupid Wall-Street targets. But with the introduction of RedHat they get new "blood" as it were. Who knows, what if they make the CEO of RedHat the CEO of IBM a la Satya Nadella and Microsoft?
They have said that RedHat would remain an independent part of IBM as part of their cloud push. Let's take them at their word unless they prove us wrong. Also, if nothing else, this could give RedHat even more money to make ambitious bets -- perhaps we might see Power9 systems running Fedora soon?
In the end I think this is, on the whole, a good thing. Now, does MS buy Canonical?
The analogy isn’t 1:1 but I think the core of MS and what he was doing in the cloud division might as well had him an outsider. MS was still highly Windows first all others second under Ballmer. Under Nadella he bet the future of the company on cloud and it’s been the right choice. What if they do the same with a changing of the guard — not immediately but eventually?
Wow. Not good for Red Hat in the long-term. Feels like the Sun takeover by Oracle a few years ago. Maybe they can maintain their efficient internal structures, but i have the feeling they will get caught in IBM internal power struggles and politics and lose their hands-on problem solving power.
This will only work out if IBM beefs up it's data centers to clone AWS (Lambda, Batch, S3, RDS, SQS, Fargate), gobbles Netifly, then puts mainframe DB2 in the cloud next to commodity servers. Also needs to open the ZOS toolchain and get a modern syntax and tooling around COBOL.
I worked for a company that used bluemix PAAS (cloudfoundry based back in 2016).
We were early adopters(customers), the service was not really stable at that time (but we were not in production yet) but it improved and ended up quite stable before we left for different reasons. I think I preferred (cost aside) their PAAS offering to some competitors like AWS beanstalk.
This has been my experience too, and not when it was released. I was playing with some of their APIs last month and it was horrible: CORS issues, high latency, random failures or server errors for no reason.
I figured bringing up that Tumblr will get flagged or at least downvoted, but it is amusing to ponder what would be the biggest, most high-profile acquisition in tech to merit an entry. Doubly funny when the firms involved aren't Silicon Valley startups but old enterprises.
I guess any publicly traded company is by definition at risk of being bought (or merged in this case) without notice or even much public speculation -- but this one feels particularly surprising as I'd been assuming much of Red Hat's value for its customers was its corporate-friendly support arrangements combined with its apparent independence from the traditionally-perceived excessively-corporate heavyweights.
The arguably customer-hostile licensing changes at Red Hat over the last few years are possibly an indicator of a shift in company culture.
On the other side, I've actually felt positively towards IBM since the 1990's when they started to commit heavily to a lot of free software efforts.
I would feel a lot better about this if their other recently acquired properties showed a better user experience, especially weather underground and the weather channel.
I'm not an IBM hater by any means. My FIL was a beemer; I have a good friend who is still one, along with various others I've known through my life. I cut my teeth on IBM mainframes, and my nostalgia for things like xterm stem from that.
But their recent track record is troubling. To an outsider it seems like they haven't formed a cohesive corporate strategy, and they've been making things up quarter to quarter.
I don't feel good about this, I'm sorry to say. I hope I'm wrong.
I am so sad about this. There is nothing good that I see coming out of this, but I hope that's just my bias. Red Hat has been a huge contributed to Linux and open source for years, I want to keep my Fedora!!
I completely agree. I feel the same about MS buying Github, too. We are seeing so much consolidation in so many markets, the only true outcome will be that it will be a worse environment for the rest of us.
So...how does this - if at all - impact linux (running smoothly) on thinkpads? From what i hear, beyond the normal open source contributors, numerous redhat engineers contribute towards fundamental device drivers for the thinpad platform of laptops...which, as i undestand it, why linux distros run soooo smoothly on for example my thinkpad t420. Perhaps my thought is selfish, but i love me some thinkpads - specifically because they run linux sooo nicely. So, will ibm force these guys to focus on other stuff? Or, am i worried for nothing?
Thinkpads are still nice machines to run not only linux on, but also openBSD. (most, if not all openBSD dev's run thinkpads as their development machines).
That blog post from cormier scares me. Its so cheerleading and the use of "we" like any one besides the employees at RedHat get a piece of that buyout. "Opensource is here to stay." ... Im not holding my breath. But I am bullish on the possibilities. If IBM doesnt F this up I hope they realize that people dont have negative feelings about them like Amazon and Google. People want a tech company that is more tech and less politics. IBM dont do anything special just have a simple payment structure with a product that works.
I really don't understand this. Redhat has been very profitable lately, what do they stand to gain from this? Why do they need cash so badly, what are they investing in?
Their success is so dependent on having management that understands how unique their business model is, I just can't understand why they'd be so desperate for cash that they'd risk screwing that up. Even if you have confidence that it's going to be fine for the next 5 years, what about 15 years from now? They've signed their soul away.
They don't need the cash, they want the cash. What management and shareholders stand to gain from it is cashing out. That's the way business works. Not saying it's the way things should be, just the way they are.
I don't really understand how IBM keeps rolling along, as they outsource more and more of their workers and kill off entire divisions of their best-known products. They don't really make software anymore, they don't really make hardware. Their cloud offerings are an also-ran behind Oracle. They have a massively overhyped, marketing-driven AI division. Mostly they seem to do the awful kind of IT consulting that the other H1B sweatshops engage in, but perhaps at a slightly more prestigious level.
I kind of wonder how many of the people here bemoaning this buyout, also buy into the vc model, where the ultimate 'goal' for most startups is a buyout by a bigger company.
Left CentOS about 4 years ago for Ubuntu, never looked back. Debian is a better system, Ubuntu is a very nice consistent distro. You should check out Proxmox, also debian based, very nice alternative for containers in small-medium deploys. Cheers and open-source on!
EDIT: AGAIN down voted for no good reason! Is this automatic? How does this work? Cheerio, will log off for another six months, if anybody can suggest another real hacker's forum I'd be very grateful! TIA
Red Hat has contributed so much to open source projects. Even if you don't use their distribution, their contributions are present in countless initiatives and projects.
When I was at IBM my laptop ran RedHat enterprise. Was the brightest spot in working for a miserable company like IBM. I miss that now that I am forced to use Windows 7.
Can someone help me understand... What exactly do IBM and Oracle do? I assume they are mostly hired to build software and do software/hardware/networking/database services. How much of their business is government contracts? Everyone here is talking about how nobody enjoys hiring them but they are billion-dollar companies... I have never worked in the public sector nor at a conglomerate so I am unable to comprehend this.
usually, IBM is used for very large enterprise projects and it is usually done at a "high level". (aka, architecture et al, not direct implementation).
IBM is a slow, corporate monster, but it is very good at doing high, exec level consulting.
They failed at PC.
They failed at Cloud
They failed with Watson
They failed with Bluemix
They ...... with Redhat.
In game theory, there are two types of players: Finite and Infinite. They are in the long run for sure and definitely they don't have pure strategy just a mixed one that doesn't go anywhere but stay where is it, until there's no one else playing the game anymore.
IBM stands for ( I Bullshit Millions)
IBM had power and if anyone remembers it was also part of cell architecture team along with sony and Toshiba. I worked with yellow dog linux the official linux distro for sony ps3 . IBM at that point was still pushing for Red hat instead of investing in yellow dog which was powerpc centric. Red hat fedora later dropped support for powerpc. So in all IBM hardware failed and now it is trying to go is way?
This is terrible news, I really hope this deal does not go through, get blocked by shareholders or by anti-trust laws.
I also remember that IBM is not doing good - profits are decreasing and their software and services division fail to produce any innovation for the last years.
Did IBM need to buy whole RH to strengthen their cloud offering? Couldnt they just partnered with RH cloud division, leaving RH Core team independent?
I can see independent software vendors like Heptio and Canonical being the main beneficiary of this deal.
IBM can sweat the old large companies but they have no credible cloud offering and this doesn't change that. Converting on-prem to kubernetes and using a proper cloud like Google, AWS or Microsoft without also paying steep margin to IBM would seem to be more attractive.
IBM is a sales-driven company that mainly focuses on closed-source proprietary software. Red Hat is an engineer-focused, innovation driven company that's completely built around the open-source Linux kernel.
The two worlds just seem incompatible to me, and I assume a lot of people share the same concern as I do.
1. DB2 is a damn good database imho.
2. And J9 was the fastest JVM when I benchmarked it about a year ago using jmh.
3. And I think Websphere Liberty is a damn fine app server also.
4. I really like Power based CPUs.
5. Talos is made possible because of the open approach that IBM had in creating the power platform.
6. I think loopback is pretty cool also.
I'm of two minds to this. I have a personal POWER6 running AIX and it handles my main hosting and mail. It's a great box and I love the hardware, but the IBM salesdroids would never talk to me (I do all my business through a VAR), and the CUoD nonsense and having to use a whole separate HMC to manage the single LPAR is obnoxious.
On the other hand, I absolutely love my Talos II. It's not an IBM machine, but it's engineered by them; the POWER9 is IBM, a lot of the OpenPOWER and PowerNV stuff is still as IBM designed it, and IBM contributes hardware support.
So I understand this feeling when dealing with IBM as a vendor. They suck. But I think IBM hardware is solid and their R&D is top-notch, and I'd buy IBM again (just not from them).
No, IBM isn't going to be good for Linux. RedHat as an independent company supported a lot of efforts to make Linux better overall, including reverse engineering hardware drivers, which most companies won't care about in the least. I don't trust IBM to continue that, so it will be a major setback to Linux efforts.
Seriously the amount of Watson hype IBM is spinning is astounding. Recently went to a vendors sales presentation on IBM Rhapsody, and they are touting some sort of rudimentary interactive agent, as powered by 'Watson'.
I have to wonder if folks aren't making more of this news that is really there. I mean besides a lot money changing hands and the usual process of IBM taking on a lot of employees and eventually laying many of them off.
Could anyone venture to predict how this might effect the wider Linux ecosystem?
Hi all, I'm a reporter with Bloomberg. I'm keen to track the acquisition and how it's being received, especially from the Red Hat end. If you're an employee and would like to chat, please reach out. I can keep it completely anonymous. gerritdevynck@protonmail.com
So, with SUSE getting sold to some equity firm and Red Hat being bought by Oracle's slightly less evil twin brother, is Canonical really the only "independent" Linux OS vendor left?
And here I thought this was going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop™...
We're in the middle of a rollout of CoreOS. We'll finish the deployment, but won't be going in on any of the differentiators like locksmith. If only to make our possible migration to either (1) Debian or (2) The inevitable fork of Container Linux easier.
Kind of surreal news honestly, my interest in this is about like I would imagine if I was going to a Monster Truck show and found out several drivers would be absolutely plastered the whole time: I'm pretty sure something very bad is going to happen.
We have been preparing to move from Windows to RHEL. We are pretty far along in the process, but there is still time to switch distros. This is primarily for database and web servers. Does anyone have any recommendations on a different distro?
IBM's market cap is a little more than 100B so far. It costs more than 30B to acquire RH, that means IBM realize that if it doesn't do something useful, it will sink.
RH maybe the only one that's worth of purchasing and IBM can afford.
What will happen to the parts of IBM and Red Hat which overlap? If there is competing tech which adds to IBM's bottom line then chances are that is what IBM will keep. It will be interesting to know what those areas are.
> It will be interesting to know what those areas are.
JBoss vs WAS will be a major thing where they are most directly competing. Java, especially in its EE incarnation, is not so hot on HN but massively important in the enterprise.
As a Corp buyer of both, it seems like one dinosaur buying another. When IBM (Or CA or Oracle or any other old school firm) buys another company, it almost always results in underinvestment in product and worse support.
It's not about IBM at all. We have AWS/Azure/GCP out there. IBM and Red Hat? That reminds me Intel+samsung or Nokia+Qt when there are already Android/iOS/WP.
Wondering how this is going to affect their recruiting pipeline. I submitted an application myself last week but now have absolutely no interest in being a guest at this feast.
I probably can understand the motivation from IBM side. Most big/great companies have a long term vision and strategy. I did not get Redhat, is it good to join IBM?
Was there some behind-the-door takeover, from a friend to a friend? Or a pressure from investors like MS with Nokia? It just doesn't make any other sense...
RH fell behind the times. Their paradigm of a stable though an older kernel was suitable for the times when kernel wasn't that stable and things in the industry were developed slower than today. I work in a big enterprise space and usually we do Ubuntu if we can and SUSE Enterprise if we can't :), i recently tried Docker/Kubernetes on a recent RHEL - looking at the kernel version i already didn't expect the stuff to work and of course it didnt work (no complete namespaces features support). Their push for their own custom software platform instead is a good match for IBM.
Good luck IT-blessing kernel changes at BigCo-s. And what would be the purpose of a BigCo buying RHEL if one has to mock around with kernel afterwards? Anyway though, the RH not being a cloud player that has been making it obsolete too.
Hopeful outcome of this, provided IBM realizes it is the student in this situation:
IBM's historical reputation coupled with Red Hat's proven success and products creates a serious competitor to Microsoft at the small-to-medium enterprise level. As Red Hat gains share, other corporate Linux flavors ride the rising tide, and Linux finally captures the long tail.
Further out, Microsoft transitions to being a device company a-la Apple. Bill Gates comes back to save the floundering company but insists that each device offer mechanized vaccinations, leading to skyrocketing prices and general shunning from the populace, which has gradually devolved into rabid anti-vaccination fervor. Microsoft fails, and is ultimately embraced, extended, and extinguished by IBM/Red Hat.
Is this really the case? I had always heard that part of the reason ThinkPads have such good Linux support is their use internally at Red Hat (who pushed the relevant code upstream).
can someone explain to me what will happen tomorow at market opening ?
Currently redhat is quoted 114$, IBM announced they will buy all share at 190$. will it be tradable tomorow morning at market opening ?
For a large public corporation usually a clear majority of shares are held as pure investment by big institutional investors like pension companies. Their goal is to turn a small amount of money into a large amount of money without too much risk. So they have no reason to block this sort of deal.
Moreover, such companies are often desperate to minimise overheads on operations. Once upon a time they'd employ dozens of specialists, now they're relying on computer models as much as possible to reduce costs and don't much care about what's actually driving the price changes that the model is looking at.
Boards at big companies actually now know this. Suppose you're the board of a big corp and you'd like $10M each even though you didn't do a good job? Just write up paperwork saying you propose that you get paid $10M extra each because of diddly-dee, put it up for a vote by shareholders with a recommendation that they vote "Yes". A few smaller shareholders are paying attention, they'll vote "No". The big institutions are entirely on auto-pilot, and will follow your "Yes" recommendation, your vote passes, you now get $10M with no effort. Giving the board a pile of money for no reason might bankrupt the company. Not your problem, the shareholders voted for it.
For the pension company making your shareholders $10 and then asking for $1 to cover overheads from actual specialists (10%) is seen as worse than making your shareholders $8 and then asking for 10¢ to cover overheads from a few pencil pushers (1.25%) even though in the first scenario the shareholder kept $9 and in the second they only got $7.90. Nobody wants to pay 10%. The result was foreseeable but it's hard to say if it could have been prevented.
The Red Hat board will recommend shareholders accept the offer. Big institutions will (and in this case in my opinion quite rightly) automatically agree and so it doesn't matter what a handful of small private shareholders do.
I had to check twice if I hibernated and it was April 1st.
TL;DR IBM just bought a controlling interest in almost every Linux based system on the planet, and thus all the big companies making money with Open Source.
The articles (and Stalman interviews) happening recently pointed to this situation. Open Source, as adopted currently, is a flawed model that valors corporate protection more than end-user freedom.
github is now sourceforge. redhat is now suse Linux. etc.
all the little benefits you got having an apache or bsd license over gpl will start to bite you now. Case in point: every major company has a opensource executive whose only job is to make sure all projects are using closed-source-permissive licenses.
> Open Source, as adopted currently, is a flawed model that valors corporate protection more than end-user freedom.
I see your point, and I mostly agree.
I would like to differentiate between Open Source organizations - like Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation or Mozilla Foundation - and mixed organizations like Oracle (owns MySQL), RedHat (owns too many to list), etc.
The first ones represent the pure Open Source approach. Were the software and how it better serves humanity is their main concerns. The second ones are just business that see in Open Source and gratis (free as in beer) software a way to get a bigger user base and to kill any possibility of competitors from the bottom as new entries cannot compete as easily with products that you do not need to pay for.
Real Open Source foundations are fundamental for a functional global software industry. The other ones bring value, but they use Open Source projects as a weapon against competitors, not as something for the good of its users. And that ones are the ones that value corporate protection more than end-user freedom.
This reminds me of an article[1] I wrote predicting shifting trends in Open Source development, in particular of core infrastructure tools.
There is a huge ripe opportunity for a new company/non-profit to step in and set precedence on the future of developer tools. People don't "Dream Big" anymore, and having the biggest OSS companies absorbed by the most proprietary of companies is a perfect example of hope being lost. I hope we can revert this trend, who wants to help?
HELP, I have a big question :
The buyout will go to the shareholders, that is a deterministic ~30% net benefit. (the offer being ~30% > than the market cap)
So WHY shouldn't us the readers of the news, buy shares right now, before the market react ?
And we can even imagine a Web crawler software that detect that entreprise X announce to buy entreprise Y && the offer being > to the market cap, then auto buy ?
It's already too late to buy "before the market reacts". This is public information now, so it will be priced into the market price once the stock market opens.
Yes but my question would be, not everyone will buy at market opening T+1, but more some hours after ? Is This still impossible because of bots ? Tomorow empiricism will answer me.
Because there is nowhere(?) you can trade those shares right now, and if those places do exist, the local price almost certainly already reflects this news. Tomorrow morning, the new information will also influence the opening auction, and retail trades haven't a mission of catching any of the action
You might find on Monday the price tends upwards slightly for most of the day, which seems typical of this kind of news, but really, all the value of this deal is captured by existing shareholders -- who is going to sell you their shares at a cut price?
Still the price stock hasn't gone uploads.disquscdn.com but this must be because we need to wait for tomorow opening.
Are there any of thèses bots on github ? Why don't they work, are the market already fully saturated with those bots ?
Discussing economics is off topic in a business merger? Its completely on topic. Economics is literally the study of scarce resource allocation. In the US, that’s everything from personal choice, business operations, through to global considerations.
To quote the dictionary “a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services”
It’s my understanding that HN is for technical discussions and business discussions. That’s exactly what my comment discussed. Further, that book by Galbraith is widely considered the gold standard for the Great Depression.
TLDR: if you want hacker news to be taken seriously as a place to discuss business and tech then my comment is appropriate in a merger discussion.
I feel you're right, which is why I'm surprised by the seemingly negative response to this news, and the overwhelmingly positive response from GitHub+Microsoft.
Some of the same conflicts of interest exist in both modern cases, notwithstanding, both have opposite contribution histories.
There are periods of concentration and entrepreneurship. Part of the market maturity lifecycle. As a market gets more well established, competitors become less differentiated and start competing on cost which leads to consolidation. This creates openings for upstarts to disrupt or open new markets.
... and yet there is no shortage of examples of ownership being consistently more concentrated over time. Are we are right around the corner from seeing "upstarts" in the television, telecoms, and food manufacturing industries?
Please don't troll threads, intentionally or not, by throwing in classic flamebait. It seems funny at the time, and then we get another systemd or whatever flamewar.
Now talking seriously, even if IBM stopped funding the project, it wouldn't be such a disaster. First of all, it's open source. A new mantainer could take over the project (for free) so the distributions can keep using it. But even if a replacement had to be found, the process wouldn't be traumatic... just like when Debian, the base of many other distributions, adopted systemd some years ago.
The warnings for #1 were clear. Nobody wanted to hear or heed them. I have little sympathy for those that adopted it despite many people begging them (distro maintainers) not to.
I would stay away from upstart because canonical. SysV, yes in the blink of an eye.
But you are mistaken if you think systemd is about init, it has gobbled so much stuff that this thing is a monstrous kitchen sink on its way to engulfing the whole bathroom.
then again maybe there are other init systems options than those two, devuan which arose from keeping systemd out of debian offert no less than 6 alternatives that address SysV flaws: openrc, sinit, runit, s6 and shepherd.
That is to say, there are quite a number of modern inits that are not systemd. It's such a straw-man argument to bring up sysv init every time someone says something critical of systemd.
Yes, without question. Systemd provides me absolutely no benefit when running a server and adds considerable complexity and fragility in a critical component.
A traditional SysV init is just fine. Want orchestrated service invocation on startup? Run it from SysV init instead of replacing SysV init.
There is no need to conflate the "sysv rc system" with "sysv init." They are entirely separate things.
I'd rathe someone take another shot at service management.
I don't want to hold onto everything about SysV style systems - I love SMF in Solaris! - but I'd definitely prefer a leaner and more focused approach to development than we see with systemd.
No, it was just a joke, you know... but in fact I've checked and I'm already running upstart right now, as part of my Ubuntu LTS system. So really no need to "go back" :P
I switched to Gentoo because of systemd. I switched to OpenBSD because Linus was recently 'compromised' and adopted the CoC (worse: it's the highly political Creator's Covenant version). Theo's philosophy is shut up and hack, much like the early Linus with the bonus of being security instead of performance oriented.
I'd love to see a Portage Prefix on OpenBSD, or Gentoo/kOpenBSD, effort start up again. Bringing Portage to OpenBSD (even if prefixed) would make a wonderful combination!
redhat had a lot of love in the world. any other vendor that shoved systemd down everyones throat would have been villified. redhat was given a pass. (karma, anyone?)
This is just as well, as I'm moving quite a bit to Net and OpenBSD. I'm tired of the Linux drama (systemd, CoC, balkanised standards, etc.) the broken stuff between distros. The slower changes for BSD development typically means more stable software. And ZFS. Plus, I actually prefer the ICS/BSD license for software in general, as it's maximally free. I've found over the years, that my BSD boxes are far and away more stable than their Linux counterparts. I do devops mostly, so stability and long-term availability are key factors. ext4 is getting long in the tooth and btrfs is nowhere near ZFS in stability or ability or I/O. I've never had a BSD system crash unexpectedly other than bad HW. I cannot say the same for Linux, even RHEL. I feel like a kid again in many ways, because I get to explore all the cool things the BSDs can do again. I'm even moving my Raspberry Pi over to NetBSD in the coming days as a prototype platform to explore BSD embedded possibilities.
I've gotten into the habit of replying to hidden and/or censored comments on HN :)
Would be sweet to see some competition by BSDs on mobile. Like an OpenBSD-Android. I guess that would take forever to get up to speed at this point, though... Hopefully manufacturers like OnePlus donate to the CopperHeadOS project so their hardware gets supported!
I went to IBM(India) interview sometime in 2011, after leaving GlusterFS (Red Hat). Interview went well, during final call with management. I was asked to stop working on Open Source during weekends or off-hours even though the IBM project and my Open Source work has nothing in common.
I said, "I thought, IBM support Open Source right?" his response, "Yes, but that's another team"
I decided to call-off the interview after that.
I am currently working for IBM and I'm tied. I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. What I have in contract is - if you want to open a company, you need IBM's permission first.
And it's just frustrating as they try to block it for as long as possibe even if you're not doing IT in your private little business.
A long time ago I joined IBM via an acquistion of the company I worked for. One part of the (lengthy) contract I had to sign, was a form listing any side projects I may have that I would be required to no longer work on. I simply omitted that page when I returned the contract and no one ever noticed.
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> I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue.
I am pretty sure this is the standard practice at all large companies, at least in the US. Small companies may just not care too much, but even at a small company if your management notices you might have to choose between that and your day coding. I wish it was not like this, but to me this is at least somewhat justifiable.
Much worse is the desire of most employers to control everything you do, including your work on open source project off hours. Want to fix coordinate computation for an open source satellite sim? Call the lawyers first. Lead a robotics club at a high school? Check with the management. IMO many employees do it anyway and hope to not get called on this, but this is formally going against the contract.
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People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it.
I've routinely done this with every contract I've ever signed. Nothing gets signed without legal scrutiny on my part and it never will; and I've quite literally never had a potential client or employer balk at this.
All of them have agreed that my amendments have been quite reasonable - and that includes scrubbing through any sections that prevent me from working for other clients or writing my own projects, commercial or otherwise.
Ensuring a contract is fair and equitable is part of doing business. There is nothing wrong with this. When you work for a company, you are still an autonomous person with your own agency. Any company that seeks to deny that agency don't deserve your employ.
Any reasonable and honourable company expects you to review contracts and amend them. You shouldn't feel bad about doing this. Nor should you feel coerced by the fact that they have given you a one sided contract. Make it equitable.
I don't care if you're IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or God almighty, himself. If you choose to attempt to quell my agency, our relationship is done. I will not be denied my agency and neither should anyone else.
Those companies that over-reach in a bid to control their employees are unscrupulous. This is the same kind of toxic behaviour that people seek to avoid in their relationships, yet somehow they're quite willing to live their life working in relationships like this... I don't understand the double standard.
I've heard soooooo many people say that "contracts are just standard paper and if I rock the boat I won't get the job."
Don't be bullied into signing a contract because you feel like you don't have any other option.
Contracts are not "standard paper," they are legally binding documents that seek to limit your behaviour. Don't let any employer reach outside their jurisdiction and into your personal life. Ever.
>People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it.
How do people do this these days? Virtually everything I sign these days from my employment contract to my lease to the vast majority of the paperwork for my mortgage was all signed electronically. There's no apparent mechanism for redlining sections when e-signing.
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(OT) I interviewed with IBM after they were acquiring my companies resources at the time. My first two interviews went swimmingly. On my third the interviewer had marked through my last name on my resume and when I asked about it she said she assumed I had spelled it wrong. That was the best thing that happened in the interview.
She assumed you misspelled your own last name? That's so bizarre.
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I'm an IBMer and the current rule is you can work on OS projects in your own time as long as it isn't to the detriment of IBM's projects.
Funnily enough, one of the most praised points in Red Hat's code of conduct is the fact that it specifically says that you can work on open source projects _even if it is to the detriment to Red Hat_. Guess that's going to change now.
Disclaimer: Red Hat employee (at the moment)
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IBM has such a large portfolio that you are probably hard pressed finding an OSS project that doesn't compete with an IBM solution.
As IBMer you should know there are a plurality of local IBM all over the world, each with local laws and regulations to abide. In Italy all work produced off hours as subordinate is intellectual property of the employer by default unless you sign off a release form for each of them. In Ireland at least they don't want you to touch third party open source code without license vetting because it could inspire you subconsciously and result in copyright infringement.
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I can see Joel's points here and this is relevant to the discussion.
It's probably the article he has written I disagree with the most as there is a simple way to deal with this; be very clear about the projects, code and designs the employee works on each month and sign them over as they are delivered. That way the employee's own work will be clear should there be any legal wrangling. This could be done by a status in Jira for example.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
What wouldn't be the 5th time I've heard such stories, but I don't think it's in any way specific to IBM. Employers like that want any OT you do to be dedicated to THEIR endeavor, not somebody else's...even your own.
If you're able and willing to code in your off-time, you should be doing it for the good of the Company. /s
It's a terrible and completely unreasonable stance for an employer. You get the hours you pay for. You don't get to own people's free time.
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Yeah sure, and if you like I can also clean the bathrooms because I know how to do it... Off-time is for your own not for your company regardless off what you do with it.
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If they want that sort of dedication they can give me equity or back off.
> If you're able and willing to code in your off-time, you should be doing it for the good of the Company.
Excuse me, what the f...?
> /s
Go back to Reddit, please.
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The same is for Intel...
I would have done the same.
Having worked at IBM for 10 years, this is what I have come to know how IBM operates top-down:
1. To make significant profits, we need to sell services on top of our software products (this is essentially GBS and their "strong" sales people)
2. To make very good profits, we need to make highly customizable software (for example AI and BI offerings).
3. To make even more profit we need to make sure the software is tuned to the hardware we make.
If one of those weakens the entire IBM portfolio and profits weaken dramatically.
Here's problems in last 7 years tho: 1. People moving to the cloud so the hardware business flatlines. 2. Because people moved to the cloud they found replacements to IBM software. 3. At the end of the day IBM is forced to deliver professional services on top of other companies' software and hardware (and services employees are not cheap).
At some point the IBM execs must have had an epiphany that their AI offerings don't sell because they don't have a platform that sells other commodity cloud services on top of which AI components can be sold as high-priced addons.
So thus IBM decided to do what it does best --- take control of the entire stack.
With this acquisition IBM has the potential to become a next gen. cloud vendor. For example IBM has been trying to sell Bluemix as a hybrid PaaS/IaaS but haven't been very successful. The engineering team in Bluemix is weak and one way to really up the ante is getting access to top talent in the industry to do this (CoreOS team, Openshift.io team, linux kernel devs, distributed storage devs).
What's not clear here is that why would one company, which is dong pretty well, better every year, would want to be sold to another company, which doesn't look well (from your own description), instead of just continuing growing and eventually "winning" the cloud market by themselves? Is that just because top Red Hat people wanted to cash out more quickly?
Maybe because IBM would have provided a superior price, and RedHat is a public company answerable to shareholders.
Let's take reality, RedHat is still a small player compared to Amazon, Microsoft or Google. They don't have the bandwidth to compete on all the additional hosted services offerings. By partnering with IBM, they get access to IBMs entire suite of enterprise customers and hosted products, making them a serious competitor to the 3 big players instead of being a "me too, cloud". They could make it big together, looking optimistically. But it's on IBM to not screw this up.
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They bought them for 136x earnings, for a mature company with $100s of millions, that's a pretty sweet multiple.
redhat must also have seen that their ability to grow will rely on a handful of clouds that may or mayn't continue to enable them on their platforms.
.. they probably though the price right now is better than what they would get in 5 years.
redhat was trading at around $120 last week and IBM announced "Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion."
That $120 was really high for redhat, who just crossed the $100/share price last year. (unless you count year 2000/dotcom-IPO-madness) RHT's market cap was previously $20B.
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Amazon, Microsoft, Google. Now that RedHat has to compete against all three, perhaps it felt that now was the time to cash out.
Because IBM vastly overpayed and there will not be another opportunity like that any time soon.
Guys, this is not just, or mainly not RH Linux. :(
- kernel development
- Ansible
- JBoss (I know HN hates Java, especially Java EE, but it was and is an important factor in enterprise OSS adoption)
- OpenShift
- Ceph, Gluster
All these are in danger, not just RHEL. I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS. Canonical is way behind Red Hat in terms of revenue (1/20).
Sad.
Also in practice glibc, systemd, GNOME, etc. have a ton of maintainers from Red Hat, even if they're not Red Hat-owned the way Ansible or Ceph is.
Yeah the whole freedesktop.org stack is to a large extent RedHat folks.
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Maybe they just bought redhat to kill off systemd. Ah, one can hope...
I don't know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS.
Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they're not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.
WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.
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SUSE? They make a big song and dance (literally) of being open source, but I don't know if they're exclusively OSS.
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Is openshift really open source? I was under the impression that nobody really runs origin on its own since it's far too hard. It seemed more like they just wanted to point out but it's open source, but you need support and a lot of know-how to actually use it.
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Collabora?
Add Fedora to the list - while technically a community project, Red Hat is the main contributor.
It seems to me that Red Hat is based on Fedora. Fedora being the fast release gratis community version and Red Hat the slow release commercial corporate version.
Then CentOS would the community gratis version of Red Hat.
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Also with RH's recent acquisition of CoreOS, that suite will also be in IBM's arena. I work for "a corporate". We used to be big IBM shops (AIX, IBM Java, websphere, etc, etc...). But AIX is now hardly used and neither is websphere. It's mostly off the shelf k8s, wildfly and other open source projects deployed on RHEL (not my personal favorite since its kernel is way behind the times). I think this is IBMs way of playing catch up in the arena. I worry how they will handle entrenched "political interests" - e.g. Webpshere/AIX/etc.. and the more open source friendly RedHat suite. Pretty sure its going to be one big mess in a few years time.
They _did_ pay a lot of money to acquire them, so there's a reason to believe they're committed to fully integrating RH technology. Considering Jim, who certainly has an interest in the survival of open source software, signed this off also gives some hope.
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The OpenShift folks sit on a ton of critical posts in the Kubernetes project. I'd suspect this is what IBM wants, but it's a risk that they stop contributing to the open source project.
It goes much deeper than that, Red Hat maintains or contributes regularly to a wide swath of the Linux ecosystem. They also have a policy of open sourcing acquisitions. If the deal goes through, it's a dark day for open source software.
- kernel development
- OpenShift
I very much doubt these 2 are in any danger. In fact, I'd say these are the golden eggs IBM wants.
Agreed. Seems that most $largeco I come across used to use IBM AIX and are switching to RHEL. This seems more strategic than surface level only.
You might want to read up on your Aesop’s fables ;)
Red Hat's Open Source only approach does mean that none of these projects can be closed down, though: AFAIK, IBM are acquiring people and a brand, but no significant proprietary IP. If higher-ups at IBM turn out to be as clueless as Oracle, then key engineers will just walk and continue working on those projects elsewhere.
Where elsewhere? The landscape of options to be paid for your OSS has just become a barren field.
Yes, OSS as a concept can survive only on gratis work. However I'm not sure the portfolio of projects supported largely by Red Hat maintainers could. If maintainers are forced to start walking as they did with Oracle I expect to see quite a few projects fall into disrepair.
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Also Atomic/CoreOS - this will probably be cut now, perhaps even before it is complete.
http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2018/06/welcome-to-fedora-c...
I doubt it. When you read the IBM and Core OS acquisition press releases side by side you get a lot of the same "hybrid cloud" language.
Update: Near as I can tell the acquisition completed in March/April.
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Pivotal is probably next in line for size for independent enterprise OSS but still a fraction the size of Red Hat, at under $1b in revenue. And some proprietary bits.
Also CoreOS, recently acquired by Redhat.
IBM would rather push Spectrum Scale/GPFS over Ceph or Gluster
Spectrum Scale Support is one of the most horrific things I've encountered in my entire professional career.
- etcd
Also everything CoreOS-related.
CoreOS :(
Super pessimistic point of view. Why do you think these are all in danger? These are things that people and more importantly enterprises use. Why would IBM ruin that?
Because IBM ruins everything it touches?
It’s possible they don’t want to. But they will.
Exactly, these are products to monetize and make money from.
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> I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS.
Doesnt Microsoft tick all those boxes? Even if they aren't exclusively an open source company, they are "absolutely behind OSS" if you go by how much open source code they have contributed.
How on earth is Microsoft "absolutely" behind OSS? Which of their main products is Open Source? Windows? Office? SQL Server? Azure? Exchange? What exactly makes Microsoft a company "absolutely behind OSS?"
Their stupid boot loader still ignores any other operating system for god's sake.
Kudos to people at Microsoft's Marketing and "developer relations" department who won the hearts of developers by allowing TypeScript and VSCode to be FOSS. Suddenly MS is "Absolutely behind OSS".
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Meh. They have a bad reputation due to calling open word source software cancer the new windows business model.
Also, while their engineers are certainly smart, their software seems very crusty (the down side of infinite backwards compatibility) and usually doesn't play well at all with existing open source software. Thus: Mostly useless.
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Mostly useless projects though for people that want speed and Linux-native open source.
On the other hand it might mean the end for SystemD!
zing!
Debian and Ubuntu still use it.
When I worked for IBM (via acquisition), I wanted to fix bugs in Cygwin (owned by Red Hat). Red Hat does not accept patches unless you get permission from your current employer. I could not get anybody in IBM to sign Red Hat's permission slip. Nobody would sign because it's all risk, no reward from IBM's point of view.
I have the same problem in academia, being in a non-CS department, I'm required to notify the University's Center for Technology & Venture Commercialization about assigning my copyright over software to another entity (like the FSF), but so far I have been unsuccessful at getting them to sign the letter the FSF wants, despite the code I would be contributing being completely outside of my work at the University and so therefore theoretically outside of their purview. I suppose the moral is that all large organisations converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/hour employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.
Come to Sweden then :) As a researcher you explicitly own the rights to any foreground, i.e. results, as stated by law — the so called teacher’s excemption.
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> I suppose the moral is that all large organisations converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/hour employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.
All large organizations have a decent amount of bureaucracy around copyright and IP, but the difference is good ones make it easy and straightforward for employees to go through that process.
Google, for example, has a well-documented and clear process for contributing to open source software (both in work hours and in personal time): https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/
Wait, so your university owns copyright on all your work by default?! That's a bummer if true. Outrageous, actually.
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I totally understand that large organisations don't want to sign papers about things that are none of their business. It's ridiculous that they need to sign them. This shouldn't be a requirement for Open Source contributions. But with some businesses claiming their employees' unrelated work done in their free time, I can see how this has become a necessity.
It's harmful for open source, and a terrible situation that's not to anyone's benefit. I guess US law should make more clear that employers don't own their employees' private work?
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What if you would just publish your code on GitHub, would they seek to punish you?
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This is also a major obstacle towards open science, and one that the open science community seems generally unaware of. Every day there seems to be another journal article extolling the virtues of data-sharing and imploring other researchers to share, but very few folks seem to treat the elephant in the room, which is that universities have no motivation to allow their researchers to release data for free and potentially relinquish valuable IP.
I'm a current IBMer, and there is a process for getting CLAs signed - it's a bit bureaucratic if it's not a CLA for a company we already work with, but otherwise IBM has no problems with contributing to projects like that.
I left IBM a few months ago, but I led a bunch of developer advocacy efforts for a couple years.
There are several internal programs at IBM that enable employees to make contributions to open source with very little bureaucracy. Go to the intranet site w3.developer.ibm.com for details.
Deeply regrettable. One of my colleagues identified and fixed an issue with Duplicity while he was working on a backups subsystem for our server estate, and after a quick check with a Director I was able to sign off the work for release back to the Duplicity project.
This actually seems like fair policy to me, think of the mess Red Hat would be in if IBM decided that they had copyright on your contributions to Cygwin.
Or is my understanding of copyright law off base?
That's exactly why Red Hat had said permission slips. The ridiculous thing was that IBM refused to sign them
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> if IBM decided that they had copyright on your contributions to Cygwin.
How could they decide this if you'd have written the code on a weekend?
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Couldn't you just submit patches under a pseudonym?
I think that, if you were to ask open source maintainers, "What would you think of me committing fraud to get around your project's policies?" most of them would say, "Thanks, but no thanks."
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Linux kernel, as an example, expressly rejects this.
Source: multiple discussion with GKH.
I wish Cygwin would get more steam, a new package manager and a repository...
Why wouldn't you use WSL?
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You could try MSYS2.
Honestly I probably would have just scribbled a name in a terrible hand writing (not hard for me anyways) and called it a day. They just wanted something on file that would never be looked at again.
That's more a Red Hat legal failure than a IBM legal failure.
So, I have mixed feelings.
I don't think in the short term this will be a problem. However IBM has lost it's way. its a very large unwieldy organisation that doesn't change very fast.
It also has an awful lot of lifers, who would flounder horribly outside the soft warm IBM shell.
But, there are some brilliant engineers and technologies that are inside IBM. The ones I know are about are to do with GPFS, which is a shining beacon compared to ceph and gluster.
A clever organisation _could_ mix GPFS, the vast experience with scheduling and resource allocation, and second to none documentation (have you read a Red book? they are marvels of readability.) to make a spectacular platform. One that unlike K8s would be easy to use, understand, tune, script for and run.
They won't be able to execute it properly, but they have the potential.
I definitely agree with you. I’ve been paid more or less to run GPFS over the last 15 years or so (finally free of it for the last few months), and while I hate it with a searing passion, a) it’s far better than the alternatives as long as you can afford it, and b) the people who lead and do the real work on the project are very, very bright. If they keep these people working on hard problems, they’ll do well. If they try to replace them with inexpensive staff, it will fall apart in months.
Parallel POSIX-compliant filesystems at scale are an astonishingly hard problem, and adding the feature set they have while keeping it relatively stable and performant is really worthy of admiration. Every one of the dozens of conversations I’ve had with their developers and technical leads have left me more impressed. They literally can’t test it internally at the scale that their large customers run it, but they’re really good at finding problems and pushing out hotfixes that work pretty well.
That said, if I never have to touch it again for as long as I live, I’ll be a very happy man. From an HPC perspective, I think we’re long past the scale where parallel filesystems should be POSIX-based.
At the risk of topic drift, I'm curious where the problems are with being parallel and POSIX-compliant. I'm at a point where I think I need to consider a parallel file system and I don't have much experience with them, so I'm not aware of the issues.
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> They won't be able to execute it properly, but they have the potential.
AKA The last two decades of IBM.
> GPFS, which is a shining beacon compared to ceph and gluster.
Solves an entirely different problem.
Depends on how you use it, and what its for.
_most_ object storage is actually used as a pseudo filesystem (ie S3 et al) because a shared, fast & reliable filesystem are vanishingly rare.
Apart from openstack (and I've never seen a successful deployment of it outside of rackspace) most use cases I've seen involve either bolting on a NFS head, or some other filesystem to ceph and serving it publicly.
which is frankly not all that great. I like the _idea_ of ceph, but I don't want to have to support it. Like Nexenta, it seems great, but it soon hurts during crunch.
What I like about GPFS is that it allows you to join up large amounts of block storage, regardless of the underlying fabric.
Everything has a hook, so if a file has been created/updated/moved/deleted/metadata changed, you can attach a script to that action. There is an inbuilt HSM, which allows you to shuffle files about based on their content: raw footage? move it to the spinny disk array, final deliverables? move it to the storage based in the other country. File bigger than 1TB, and hasn't been touched in two weeks, sure you can kick it out on to tape.
crucially because its all one name space, the end user doesn't have to care about where the file is, the system takes care of that based on rules.
The best part is, there are no special tricks needed for the end program, its just standard file io.
However it is one global system, which is it's downside. for pure uptime its better to have an array of file servers, to limit the blast radius, but then you don't get the goodness
Is there a short summary of which problems are solved by which filesystem?
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if gpfs still has NSD limits it ain't gonna work on a cloud scale
If IBM has one brain cell left, they'll pull a NeXT/Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company.
That is the one path to a real future for IBM instead of its slow decline into complete irrelevance.
Lovely idea that won't be possible. All that brilliance and inspiring leadership from Red Hat will be overwhelmed by the tsunami if indifference that is IBM corporate culture. On the plus side, if you're looking to hire real OSS talent for your team, I suspect a bunch of Red Hat folks will be on the market as soon as their contractual lockups expire.
RH are good at a LOT of things but sales remains a bit of a weak point compared to Oracle and to a lesser degree IBM.
Hopefully the RH guys can bring back a focus on technology to IBM while IBM figure out how to sell it to customers.
PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?
Ugh I hate their sales. There was a day they decided to spam my cell phone number constantly while I was on lunch. Not even sure how they got it, but I finally answered and got super angry with the other end. I didn’t even know it was Red Hat because they didn’t even bother leaving messages. Just back to back to back times 4 calls. Even if it were my work number, if you didn’t get through the first time, spamming my line isn’t going to get you there either.
Given that IBM are after the tech and will probably reject the culture (as also happened when Oracle ate Sun), I suggest an appropriate name would be...
Old Hat (tm)
;)
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Oracle sales means promising everything and delivering half of that at best. Are you sure you want to use that as an example?
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use the IBM sales org, with the RH leadership ;-)
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No one beats Oracle at sales, they are a sales organization; they just happen to be selling software.
> PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?
Purple hat.
Not likely according to CNBC interview [1]:
> Rometty told CNBC that the deal should not be interpreted as part of any plan for her to transition out of her position as CEO at IBM.
> "I'm still young and I'm not going anywhere," she told CNBC.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-de...
I seem to recall Gil Amelio once saying something similar...
That's a positive scenario but I don't see Ginni Rometty relinquishing control voluntarily. The IBM board has given no signs of dissatisfaction with her performance.
IBM is sliding into irrelevance in the mass market for sure, but they've still got a sizeable slice of the HPC/supercomputing market and their research in quantum computing is hard to overlook.
I work in HPC, and, well, it's VERY hard to make a good profit there.
- Customers are stingy (think academic labs, supercomputer centers etc.), are not typically married to your solution architecture so for every purchase they will put out a tender that you have to bid for and win.
- Performance is king, which means very expensive R&D, and customers don't spend much on all these "enterprise value-adds" that enterprise focused businesses use to pad their bottom lines.
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Ginny has drained the life out of IBM -- and not in a good way.
The only effective way for this to work is for RedHat to be an independent company
> If IBM has one brain cell left, they'll pull a NeXT/Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company.
Honestly, I could see that happening and working out great .. for legacy IBM customers. But if you aren't an existing IBM mainframe/midrange shop, there will be only tangental benefits for you.
To go with your Jobs analogy, the original iMac was all about preserving legacy Mac users. The new customers had to come in from a different angle. Does either RedHat or IBM have the angle?
IBM the company is like an iceberg.
The R&D and open source contributions are the tip. And the other 90% is services revenue.
And most people's experience with IBM services isn't positive.
IBM is, as far a I can tell, the best example of a "mixed bag" in tech. I have heard both great and terrible things about IBM from customers, employees, developers on Open Source projects, etc. They are a huge organization, and one that seems more divided than many.
It may be more useful to view IBM as a collection of fiefdoms rather than a single, focused, entity. Yes, the money all goes into one pot at the end of the day, but there's large variance across organizations within IBM.
That said, from what I can tell OSS that goes into the IBM machine doesn't usually come out the other side improved. I worry for the health of CentOS/RHEL/Fedora under IBM's leadership. My desktop and server OS of choice, with a few brief forays into other territories along the way, has been from Red Hat for 23 years. I'd hate to lose Fedora or CentOS, or see them stagnate. Red Hat has been among the most steadfast in their support of Open Source software, as well...so, there's a real risk of the kernel, Gnome, and other OSS core infrastructure suffering, because Red Hat is a major contributor to those projects.
I don't think it'll be sudden. It usually takes years for projects to become clearly worse for having come under IBM's purview. Red Hat is large itself, and will probably take years to be fully assimilated and homogenized into IBM's lukewarm culture of mere competence with regard to their Open Source contributions.
On acquisitions, I can offer the anecdote of a friend working at a startup IBM purchased.
Things started with "IBM loves you, and pledges to stay hands off and help you do what you're already doing", continued to "We're going to replace a few management positions with folks from IBM" and "We're changing some benefits, titles, and procedures to better align with The IBM Way", and finally ended up with "You aren't meeting your sales targets, so we're going to overhaul your leadership."
Admittedly, this was a much smaller company than Red Hat. But they were profitable before being bought and had a respected product and growth.
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We used to be a huge SoftLayer customer. Then they got bought by IBM and service/pricing/network/everything got worse. Then we left.
IBM sucks.
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IBMs revenue comes from consulting but a lot of their profit comes from software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772 with a bit more context on how I view this deal.
Is "Cognitive Solutions" mainly their AI efforts? [1] If that's the case, and given the terrible feedback they've received from many of their Watson customers (and anecdotes from people working on it)... I am tempted to say that the future is bleak for IBM, and that people will ultimately discover that they were paying a fortune for something that does not match what's advertised (they've put millions into advertising Watson with nonsensical ads)...
...but then again, many enterprise solutions that are incredibly over-engineered, slow and costly are still alive and kicking, so who knows.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/getting-started...
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Software income is because those fine consultants pushed the IBM Solution on unsuspecting customers.
I worked for IBM in the early '90s and again in the early 2000s, on a number of high visibility projects.
None of them shipped.
IBM sucks, and this is the worst news I've heard in a very long time.
Their iSeries service isn’t bad as soon as you get by the screening person whose grasp of English leaves a lot to be desired. Talking to one of their actual techs has solved everything I’ve asked. It does probably help that machine phones home when it needs parts replaced.
I don't have any contacts with IBM business-wise, so my question might sound naive: Why 90% services revenue would be a problem? They have to fund these R&D and open source contributions somehow.
Because literally every conversation turns into a services upsell.
I've migrated a site from WAS to JBoss. The support experience is night and day. WAS on IBM OS on IBM hardware not working? Pay a four-figure-per-day consult to be told that's just how WAS works on that platform, buy more hardware.
Same application on JBoss, problems with performance, RH dropped experts in as part of the support contract.
This is not a one-off in my experience. RH, Microsoft, other vendors I deal with treat a lot of these things as covered by your enterprise support contracts. IBM treat it as a chance to upsell a services engagement, and maybe pitch that the work should be outsourced, too.
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Presumably due to what GP says in the next sentence:
> And most people's experience with IBM services isn't positive.
It's been quite clear that their IT service shift was sad. The rest is still pretty pretty.
> most people's experience with IBM isn't positive.
That does not reflect my or my friends experience. Once one gets beyond the local representatives, service for me always was exceptional.
Maybe for hardware. There are pretty good about hardware support. At two companies I worked at we got people sent to us for on-site repair.
Their software support is something else. I haven't had to use IBM tooling in a while, but back when I did, everything they sold was absolutely fucking terrible (DB2, RAD, WebSphere, Clear Case, Tivoli) compared to many open source equivalents.
The only reason people buy this rubbish is because they're in an old company (bank, insurance, etc.) that has relied on it for ages and don't care about the inefficiency or cost.
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He's talking about IBM global services. If you had an exceptional experience with an IT department outsourced to IGS you'd be the first.
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There were several threads about this. We merged them into the one that was posted first.
We changed the url to the most readable and least press-releasey. The others were:
https://twitter.com/EdHammondNY/status/1056604618015285248
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-sa...
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-r...
In my opinion: Either invest in developing hacker news support for updated news comment threads better (my recommendation is to split each thread by the original article/time in a megathread and use the newest title for the base merged thread and sort the sub-threads by time or stop merging these threads because it makes it so freaking confusing as the comments are based on totally different contexts and yet they are all intermingled.
Prime other example being the tesla going private thread which I think is this one but I'm not sure because the threads are so hacked together or duped I cannot find a hacker news link to the original tweet [0].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709799
This happens whenever a story is changing rapidly. It doesn't have to do with merging the threads—it has to do with different comments dating from when different information was available. In this case the initial story was "might acquire" and then turned into "has acquired". The threads weren't neatly partitioned before we merged them; people just post to whichever discussion they happen to see.
When a story has been changing while the comments have been accumulating, HN readers are smart enough to figure it out, and I'm not sure adding new software would help much.
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Ay ay ay... if this is true then everything from RH is gonna get fatter, slower and more expensive.
Add a bit of WebSphere here, a bit of Domino there and voila. It'll then be ready for 'resource action' (aka layoffs).
Jokes aside, RH is an engineer-focussed business - IBM is an accountant-focussed business. There's just NO way these two cultures are going to work well together.
RH has been a sales-based organization.
It's like Vader asked Luke to join him in defeating the Emperor (Microsoft) and ruling the galaxy as father and son - and instead of the audience hearing "I'll never join you!!", we hear "sure, let's team up."
The cognitive dissonance is so strong here. WTF just happened? If you asked me a month ago to put down serious money in Vegas on this never happening, I'd have happily done so. What on Earth were they thinking?
IBM is basically taking it's failing Kubernetes distribution, saying "why lose when we can just buy the winners?", and went ahead and bought Red Hat and OpenShift instead. A year from now, we'll start to see heavy IBM integrations into OpenShift, radically increased licensing fees for RHEL to squeeze every penny out of enterprises which bought RHEL specifically because they need the support guarantees because they can't migrate away quickly, and every other Red Hat project - Ansible, Cockpit, Fedora, CentOS, etc., will get torn to pieces by IBM bean counters.
Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Goddamnit.
This announcement made me really sad. Red Hat was a company I admired.
I guess the only silver lining is that the buyer wasn't Oracle.
Ditto, I can almost guarantee I'll be in a meeting in the week or two where my directors will want to discuss the possibility of moving off of Redhat, at least as a contingency plan.
Obligatory link to one of the best rants ever presented against Oracle as an acquirer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m
"Do not fall into the trap... of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison... If you put your hand inside a lawnmower, it will get chopped off. The lawnmower doesn't care... The lawnmower doesn't want to kill open source. The lawnmower just can't think about open source. The lawnmower can't have empathy."
Or Microsoft (who, after all, <heart>s Linux).
I share the sentiment.
Gawd. Freaking. Dammit.
I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community.
Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
The boilerplate and vague statement of Red Hat remaining a distinct unit doesn't really tell us anything. More relevant is what the CentOS and Fedora communities think of this acquisition, because no matter what they are community driven projects.
There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out.
I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.
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Where’s the history of IBM buying and sun setting companies? I don’t have the same prejudice towards IBM that I do for Oracle. But I’m not in a position to know.
I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.
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>Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere. Not because of this anyway. There were similar concerns around RH's acquisition (if that's what you call it) of CentOS a couple of years ago, but things have largely been the same. And it's mostly for selfish reasons. The overall dev mindshare of RH based systems has shrunk compared to Ubuntu. So anything that moves people away from Ubuntu to the RH ecosystem is net win because eventually some corp will write a check when they need support. It's the same idea as MS not going after pirates just to increase MS's overall market share.
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Not a huge fan of Redhat, but I am a big user. I'm willing to wait and see.
Maybe we'll see more community offerings?
What is the relationship between RHEL and CentOS?
Never actually used RHEL, but I've heard that they're basically the same - one comes with the support, the other obviously doesn't.
Is CentOS supported by Red Hat, so IBM in theory could shut them down?
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Fedora and CentOS will both survive -- but maybe under a different name.
This is possible because everything in Redhat/Fedora/Centos is open source.
I'd be willing to bet numerous people are working on a non IBM/Redhat version of Centos.
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Donated to Apache...
zOS reboot, duh!
Kidding aside, nothing about this is good for the open source movement.
See you in RHEL.
> Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Goddamnit.
RedHat is a public company, in what fantasy land do you exist where this isn't expected?
Furthermore, the deal is still subject to shareholder approval:
> The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat. It is subject to Red Hat shareholder approval. It also is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the latter half of 2019.
So you really should be complaining that RedHat's board of directors just sold out, and that's their fiduciary duty.
Selling out is not necessarily the “duty” of the board of directors. It could definitely be in the interest of shareholders to stay independent.
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> Red Hat shareholders just sold out.
The Red Hat board were offered a massive premium on an already generously-priced stock. If they hadn't sold there probably would've been lawsuits left and right.
The deal is subject to shareholder approval. I think based on that approval, you'll be able to estimate how right or wrong you are about lawsuits had the board rejected the offer.
RHT is $20 billion in market cap as of Friday, and the offer is $34 billion.
As soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year.
What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?
SUSE has been acquired many times in the past several years (Novell, Attachmate, MicroFocus). In theory, EQT will help us "get back on our feet" in terms of self-sufficiency but how things will actually pan out is obviously still unclear.
[Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.]
Ubuntu (Canonical) just stared looking more attractive as they were trying to be an independent commercially-supported Linux offering.
Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.
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no, but most cloud providers are not opensourcing their contributions to linux.
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Well, at least my shares of DEBN just shot up.
Which went up because.... it's now seen as an acquisition target as well?
Edit; ah sorry I didn't know...
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Hopefully this will cause an uptick in Gentoo (and OpenBSD)!
Yup, since I switched to FreeBSD year or more ago it makes watching news like this much less stressful.
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And Arch Linux.
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Yeah, 10 years down the line RHEL is pretty much guaranteed dead. Probably say goodbye to Fedora as well.
This is sad, Fedora has been my favourite distribution for a little while. Red Hat have been a good community player and it is a big loss for them to be gobbled up by IBM. What is the best alternative to Fedora and CentOS?
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But Red Hat/Fedora has been a huge contributor to very basic Linux ecosystem things which everyone benefits from, like the freedesktop standard stuff and more.
I wonder how this change will pan out across the entire Linux-sphere. I’m wondering and I’m trying not to be pessimistic.
public companies are beholden to their shareholders. Enough shareholders liked the premium they were being offered...
It's not good, but it's the peril of most public quoted companies.
Public companies can have multiple classes of stock with different voting rights. Private company can be sold.
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I think it is more like Frontier buying phone lines from Verizon so they could temporarily reduce their free-fall in revenue.
Two or three years from now IBM will be the next GE.
> Red Hat shareholders just sold out.
Might be going out on a limb here, but maybe that’s why they bought the stock, so they could sell out at a profit?
Defeting aws not ms. And projects like ansible and cloud formation / manage iq are the weapons
> The cognitive dissonance is so strong here.
Where? Can you give an example of an expression of cognitive dissonance here?
I'm surprised at the amount of backlash here.
IBM's had the Linux Technology Center (LTC) for a long time and has been contributing to the community. All the platforms Z, POWER etc... support Linux as a first class citizen and plenty of other ecosystems are also supported (i.e GCC, OpenJDK, etc...)
Maybe its time to re-evaluate the old biases? The old incumbents like Microsoft have warmed up to OSS, not sure why Big-Blue is getting this much flak.
Microsoft has been doing a lot to rebuild itself as a cloud provider.
IBM has been doing a lot to go out of business.
Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines.
IBM is a floating raft of failed leadership.
Microsoft isn't trusted fully by the community but they are making inroads under their new CEO.
IBM has been firing its most senior people in an effort to slow its cash burn and to hire younger folks. IBM also claims it's also to bring on folks with more relevant skills to emerging technologies. I think there is a lawsuit about this.
Anyway, IBM has done nothing in recent years to show they are a true contender.
If the Redhat team is able to pull a Next here and assume leadership roles inside of IBM this could be stellar. Big Blue's formidable sales team and reputation with a great product line overseen by passionate people would be powerful.
If the IBM existing leadership team emerges as the winners here it will likely continue to fade into irrelevance.
> Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman
Bill Gates is no longer the chairman of Microsoft. He stepped down in 2014 to concentrate on the Gates Foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft (see "Key people" in the sidebar)
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> Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines
It'd be super awkward if TJ Watson was still leading IBM from the sidelines.
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"Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines." this is not true? maybe you meant he's a technical adviser
Thing is, IBM does not have a great reputation for how it manages its staff as it tends to favour moving positions to low cost locations and redundancies that provide the minimum possible payouts
e.g.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/18/ibm/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/29/ibm_layoffs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/27/ibm_tss/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/23/ibm_gts_workforce_o...
(and that's just from this year)
they also have a reputation for being primarily concerned with the bottom line (profit-wise) over other drivers.
So concerns around how they'll manage this kind of acquisition seem at least somewhat justified.
I've followed POWER for a while now, and it seems to be mostly marketing hype. The POWER8 was not much better than the Xeons out, and had almost no availability. POWER9 excels at a lot of IO-bound tasks, but again, it's nearly impossible to find. It doesn't help that there are very few systems you can buy out there. On paper, the POWER9 looks awesome. Then you look closer at the actual architecture and realize that a lot of pieces of the design are weird and/or seem somewhat useless. It also doesn't help that they're extremely expensive, especially since there are so few options.
So while I'd like IBM to compete with Intel, they need to pony up more money if they really want to push the industry. Don't make it so hard to buy one, and publish benchmarks/comparisons with Intel.
Based on your subcomment about evaluation, I'm very interested to hear your opinions about Talos' offerings - up to now I've only heard anecdotes from individuals drinking the security+ownership kool-aid.
What IBM offers is probably a lot more coherent and takes better advantage of what the POWER architecture has to offer, such as larger quantities of RAM, the per-node interconnect fabric, faster I/O (not just PCIe), etc (admittedly totally naive here). Plus of course there's z/OS, which I know enough about to respect (and want to play with someday :) ).
Talos basically offers only Linux and a mildly DIY standing-up experience (https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-rap...), although this is likely to be reasonably painless for non-desktop configurations (and perhaps volume orders can come preconfigured).
As a bit of a pet idea I kind of want to colocate one of the 2U or 4U systems for generic web serving and similar duties, but I fear that running a blog/discussion system on such a machine may result in a constant effort (on my part) at keeping discussion focused on the "it's a different architecture, what comp-sci interesting things can we do with it" aspect instead of getting distracted by shallow OCD-meta-security bikeshedding.
(It's kind of sad that the collective consensus about new/different architectures has to always be about security nowadays, and not about unbiased exploration, which is what we're best at)
My impression is that POWER is more suitable for certain types of scientific computation that require high degrees of precision rather than for general purpose enterprise use. POWER9 is the only CPU architecture out there that has support for quad-precision floats. Alas, no CPU exists with support for octuple floats, since only astrophysicists need that level of precision.
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sir, you make a good point. the world always changes. microsoft has changed, perhaps IBM has also. one who believes in sin and redemption perhaps should give IBM a chance.
Is there a hell for corporations?
To add some substance to my comment. I’ve interacted with IBM in different scenarios. I’ve had to manage a team of IBM consultants at work, very frustrating experience. I still shed tears every time I think the hourly rate paid vs the value they provided. When Watson was being hipped the company I was working for was approached to use the tech and come up with some PoCs, the dissonance between the biz dev pitch and the actual “solution” was abismal. Currently I’m at a different company and we have IBM as one of our customers, the image that comes to mind is a headless chicken running around. That is to say, not a very impressive impression. I’ve to say that I’ve seen some interesting stuff as well. But I’m still very sad about the buyout
No, it's time to start remembering history and that if we don't learn from it, we're doomed to repeat it.
IBM has been historically a Linux contributor. Eclipse, their open source IDE, opened the other to Java and other programming languages in the OS. And Power processors supported Linux early on. From that perspective to purchase Red Hat makes sense. It makes even more sense as the announcement states that they are trying to create a bigger cloud provider to compete with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
My main concern is the reduction on variety. All big businesses are buying layer after layer of different markets reducing the number of options that one can choose.
* https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/
* https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-r...
According to their 10Q and 10K filings, IBM is over seventy percent a consultation business with less than ten percent of revenue being made from hardware.
So with RedHat and the remains of IBMs hardware division, they make a push into the cloud with their own RISC-V servers with chips fabbed on an advanced node and with a full software stack driven by both IBM and RedHat developers. They'd be vertical in their cloud offerings.
You don't need to tell me I'm hallucinating - I know. But it's fun to imagine something good coming from this rather than the simple destruction of RedHat.
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I am CEO of WSO2, an open source software company, with 500 enterprise customers and competitive to IBM, MULE, and RHT.
I have packaged up my observations on the acquisition and the impact to open source in this blog post.
https://medium.com/@tylerjewell/ibm-acquires-red-hat-what-th...
"We expect OpenShift to become the dominant brand for Kubernetes."
That seems like a strong statement that I didn't see any backing for in the blog post. Care to expand? I haven't seen much settling in the k8s space. In fact it looks like things are still heating up with many companies pivoting in that direction.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is the real fear.
whats a WSO2
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What is a better business model then taking something that is free, and renting it at a premium ...
>>IBM has been historically a Linux contributor.
Maybe, but IBM has been historically a for profit enterprise, required to appease investors every quarter (or the CEO goes, stock crashes etc.)
They may have contributed to projects to then sell services, but make no mistake, IBM has their own interests at heart, not yours.
You do realise that a lot of Linux kernel development is being done by for profit enterprises, don't you? None of these companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they have a vested interest. Linux is at the heart of possibly the majority of modern IT infrastructure.
Besides,IBM/RH are by not even the largest contributors. Intel does more than both of them combined, and then you have other heavyweights like Google who have an interest (notably through Android) in keeping the project going. Even if IBM were to pull out for some reason, there are more than enough others who could pick up the slack.
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Are RedHat not a for profit enterprise required to appease investors? They're also a publicly traded company - and part of the S&P 500 even!
> Maybe, but IBM has been historically a for profit enterprise...
So has RedHat.
I see way too many good open source projects relying on donations, and they are not doing well. Nothing wrong with making money, or rather, it's an essential part of life (for better or worse).
Horay for Free Market! This is why all our stuff are low quality now as all the brands are actually owned by 1 mega corp.
Is this event comparable to when Oracle bought Sun? Should we expect IBM to rip RH apart and alienate all existing customers?
It's worse, IMHO. IBM treats their customers as prey just like Oracle plus they treat their own people worse. I know people who've had the IBM licensing ninja squad show up at their door for surprise validation with a big bill as a result.
I have extensive dealings with both.
Oracle are actually malicious. IBM are just incompetent.
If you can find a good account manager inside IBM for your needs, then there is a chance that you'll be able to get on well. Otherwise you'll have to do what I did which is say publicly shame the head of department on a public platform, with their superiors listening in.
Oracle however, have no shame.
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However nice their open source work is, RH licensing is already every bit as scummy as the others, at least if my coworkers in the department I used to work for are to be believed. Bait and switch freebies, "we need to run this sketchy shell script on your production system to determine how much money you owe us" nonsense, coming back with a ludicrously inaccurate bill that has to be argued over point-by-point with lawyers, the works.
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When IBM bought Informix they replaced competent database support with aggressive DB2 marketing droids and presented us with an annual bill sixty times more than Informix had charged.
The alienate and destroy part is likely. Very different situations otherwise.
Sun was essentially a dead shell that still held a few valuable pieces when Oracle purchased them. Overall the business was in terminal decline.
Red Hat, while wildly overvalued (as many things are/were in this bubble market), has a consistently growing business that is on good footing overall.
Their prior four fiscal year sales figures: $1.7b, $2b, $2.4b, $2.9b
They look like they could do $3.4b in sales for fiscal 2019.
Their profitability is mildly lacking and combined with their modest growth doesn't come close to supporting their extreme valuation (much less when the stock was 50% higher). It's not surprising the board might sell the company here, the stock market bubble is likely nearing an end, with interest rates rising or a recession coming up next (either of which guarantee it's over). Red Hat may not see much higher than this market cap for another decade - assuming continued modest growth - if they were valued at a more sane level.
Red Hat is riding relatively high. Sun was on its last legs as an independent entity. Red Hat very clearly does not need to sell here, if they do it's simply the board taking what is an extraordinary price (would have to guess the deal will value them at 60 to 80 times idealized 2018 earnings).
There is also the big difference that Sun was in the middle of transitioning to open source company (almost begrudgingly I think after everything else had failed), they weren't the great friend of open source they now are remembered as at their peak of their success. Sun still held significant amount of proprietary IP when they were acquired. In comparison RH has been open source from the get go, and pretty much everything they have is open source.
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Can't mention Oracle/Sun without linking to this amazing rant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be...
Love it. Gotta ask though - is that guy on meth or something? Hour long speech at top speed...
Cloud native/kubernetes race is just exploding.
RH strategy was mostly focused around OpenShift lately, which makes complete sense. Kubernetes is the next datacenter OS, just as ESX (and virtualization in general) was in the past 15 years and it's going to drive a radical shift in the enterprise IT world in the coming years. IBM (as an active member of the kubernetes community) see that huge opportunity and are doubling down on their efforts.
Any bets on the next player in this space to be acquired by an IT behemoth? Docker and Rancher both come to mind.
Docker just took more funding, so it'll likely be a while, but yeah I'd say they're very likely to get acquired in the medium - long term.
Rancher haven't raised in a couple of years, so might be more prone to acquisition in the short term.
In general it lseems likely that as containerization has taken off over the last couple of years , larger players who missed the boat will be looking to make acquisitions to become more relevant in that space.
Rancher desperately needs to find a niche.
Docker seems to be determined to strike it out on their own. The implications of Kubernetes takes time to materialize, and they might well sell too late.
Canonical will likely be acquired by Microsoft.
Interesting ... don't see it happening. The invested but never bought Cyanogen, so I could see them buying some stock but not buying the company.
New IBM hire, software developer. So far; I've taken part of 3 separate events where I was essentially sat through a presentation on why I should file patents (so they could farm IP off of me and my peers). IBM is a pathological company, and definitely not good news for open source.
”sat through a presentation on why I should file patents”
Some years ago, I worked for Red Hat. I remember them saying the same thing about patents. There was even some kind of reward scheme if you filed one with your name on it.
(in hindsight, I guess I should have held on to those employee stock options!)
I've seen RedHat (via JBoss) knowingly patent work they read in a research paper without referencing or funding them. I was positive it was for a reward, as there was no additionally novel ideas in their descriptions and similar work was already open sourced. I knew it wouldn't hold up so it didn't bother me as impacting my projects, but I was disappointed over the ethics of them doing that. I do wonder how many patent rewards are given for someone else's work by farming from the research community.
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You usually can't hold on to options for longer than three months after you leave a company, right? You'd have had to exercise them.
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Red Hat does incentivize patent applications, but the purpose has been defensive. The entire process makes that clear as does the licensing.
This is rather normal, not pathological. Most companies like to file patents, definitely including startups. Where do you think their patents come from, if not from work their employees do? It's work that's worth paying for.
Having some proprietary code doesn't prevent companies from also making substantial contributions to open source in other areas.
... yes, but patents are not "proprietary code", in which case granting copyright is enough. If a private company contributes code I think it could even grant the copyright to an open organization, but still decide later to sue if the method/feature/function/etc is patented by them.
Not that I'd foresee IBM or any of the real players in the IT space attempting that anymore, I think most realize that alienating the F/OSS community isn't a viable strategy for a software services company in the long term.
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actually, the normal advice for startups these days is to not file patents. They're expensive and pretty much useless. They used to be worthwhile because investors liked them, but investors aren't so hot on them any more (because expensive and usually indefensible).
> normal, not pathological
Those aren't opposites, it can be both
Have you been enjoying the morale nothings-on-fire-we-swear propoganda all-hands meetings? I was in IBM, software dev, for a year - just left around July. God help your soul.
The joy of working in a large corp. One day it's: boss's boss cares a lot about the work of this team. The next day the whole project gets cancelled. All hands propaganda meetings are so much fun ;-)
Hi there! Fellow IBMer :) sorry to hear about your experience so far, just wanted to chime in and say that you're definitely not alone with this perspective. Patents at IBM are so highly valued that they often act as a blinder towards open source.
However, there are definitely groups inside of IBM that choose to open source their work instead of filing for patents. For example, the team that I'm currently on works on the Carbon Design System [0], which is entirely open source. All the work our team does is out in the open too [1][2], which is great!
I would say that for teams like this, the tendency is to open source software and patent processes that are unique to IBM or a particular domain. That way we can try and contribute back as much useful technology as we can!
Obviously there are others at the company who might have a different perspective, but thankfully we're also trying to spread our own take on alternatives to the traditional processes at IBM.
Hope this info can help make your time at IBM a little bit better!
[0]: https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/ [1]: https://github.com/carbon-design-system [2]: https://github.com/IBM?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=carbon&type=&languag...
I'm in the Linux Technology Centre - we've got an extremely strong open source culture over here.
All major tech companies file patents - shouldn't be surprising that it's going to be part of the job.
Red hat even has like 2000 patents
Not just tech companies. I work at a bank and we've filed a bunch of software/algorithm/tech patents.
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How about SAP? Aren't they a European company where software patents have no legal force? Do they fill patents for the US too?
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All software companies do this. They use patents like cold ware nukes: if you sue us over your patents, we'll sue over ours, and nobody wins.
This is simply the inevitable result of western IP law.
Except IBM is really infamous for using and abusing theirs. Check the Sun story recited in https://www.wired.com/2012/11/the-patent-system-works-fine-b...
> "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
> IBM is a pathological company, and definitely not good news for open source.
I guess, if you ignore the part where they're one of the biggest corporate contributors to the Linux kernel.
Unfortunately, that's going to be the situation at virtually every large tech company these days. To their credit, IBM has been a longtime contributor to Linux so if Red Hat was going to be acquired, IBM is far from a worst-case scenario. It just would have been nice if they could have remained a stand-alone company (I know, wishful thinking)
It's not wishful thinking. RedHat could have remained standalone.
Maybe you are new to the software industry but at every company I've seen e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft they strongly encourage you to be filing patents.
And calling it farming is a bit strange considering you're paid by the company to generate the IP in the first place. Plus they typically compensate you extra for it.
IBM pushed what I call reckless patenting. They explicitly said, in multiple situations, that even if you think that it's a trivial idea you should attempt to patent it as it will probably get through. Personally, that sentiment goes against my philosophy. I wouldn't regard the monetary benefit to filing a patent through IBM worth the guilt I would accrue.
Note that I haven't worked for other giant tech conglomerates, but I haven't experienced it in the other medium - large but not ridiculously large companies which I've worked for.
Did they give you some of the spiral bound lab notebooks for recording your inventions? Those were the best damn notebooks... :-)
How long have you been in the industry? As far as I understand, that's a pretty standard pitch, though maybe IBM emphasizes it more.
Do you feel like your company shouldn't make money off the work you do for them? I'm confused by your tone...
I am familiar with patent reward systems, but only IBM pushed what I call reckless patenting. They explicitly said, in multiple situations, that even if you think that it's a trivial idea you should attempt to patent it as it will probably get through.
The only reason for this is to up their patent arsenal.
Some companies are better then others. I am confused about why you would ask a question that is intellectually equivalent of "... have you stopped beating your wife.." /S
Did you expect this beforehand? I can imagine they try to show themselves as being innovative and stuff, and only after you join you get the company policy details on stuff like what you just mentioned.
IBM is legendary for monetizing (many/most would say abusing) their patent portfolio. Be hard to miss this when getting hired.
Here is a pretty famous story: https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
There cannot be a single Red Hat employee outside of RH's board of directors that thinks this would be a good move for Red Hat.
As a Red Hat employee (opinions my own, not Red Hat's, etc) and though not involved in any discussions like this, I can see some potential for it being a good move. There's a lot of work being done to a) move things from mainframe to distributed and b) help people squeeze the last bits of utility out of their mainframes. That requires knowledge on both sides of the house.
The world is going to open-source distributed systems built on commodity hardware, which Red Hat has done a great job of building a business model around. For old established companies, though, the migration is a lot of work, and there are _definitely_ still plenty of large companies who have purchased/leased mainframes for long periods of time, and would like to modernize, but also can't afford to throw everything away and rebuild from scratch. There's a lot of work being done already between the two companies to run Go, Docker, Kubernetes, etc, on mainframe, and for companies with mainframe resources, being able to get a little more utility out of those sunk costs is very attractive, and something Red Hat's expertise has (and would continue to, presumably) help accomplish.
That being said, I'm pretty surprised at the news, and I'll be watching closely to see how things go.
This is the most positive comment I've seen in this thread. To the extent that the ensuing development effort finds bugs in container orchestration systems, creates new features, creates new abilities to manage services on "hybrid" private-cloud-plus-mainframe systems, helps to modernize old-school businesses that run infrastructure the global economy relies upon... this could actually be a very good thing for open source and future investment therein. Skepticism is healthy and warranted, but this could be a good match.
It's also worth pointing out that Red Hat (and Big Banks) have been desperately trying to train new mainframe operators with limited success due to the shift to distributed, to the extent that they've even been giving money to select colleges specifically to develop mainframe-centric curriculum.
I have some hopes that Red Hat has a strong-enough future value for IBM that we end up redefining IBM rather than the other way round. There are precedents, notably the Apple/NeXT merger. Today's Apple is 95% NeXT and 5% old Apple. Can this happen here? Time will tell.
An an IBM employee, I definitely hope that some of the RH culture rubs off on us, but I also hope that RH retains its own distinctive identity and isn't altered very much by the deal aside from having access to IBM's resources such as the scale of the sales organisation.
It's very unlikely, having been through a ton of m/as on a lot of sides.
RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will experience vendor hate to a high degree. But, RH is based on open source. A replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.
Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Every new cloud thing touted its pre-configured Ubuntu images, for example. Even Microsoft started with Ubuntu with WSL.
Maybe that's why a still multi-billion dollar company decided to cash out even as Linux seems to be making inroads. People used Red Hat for the same reason they used IBM: it was corporate, understood corporate needs, and knew how to serve them. Now it seems like corporations are offloading IT to AWS and friends with Ubuntu.
Everyone talks about what Canonical did for the desktop while missing what they did for friendly apt-based Linux on the server with SLAs and LTSes and support contracts from a company that speaks corporation.
And if all the paying customers switch to Debian-based distributions...
The writing is on the wall.
RH back in the day made a lot of hay by being the go-to option for enterprises migrating proprietary UNIX workloads to x86+Linux. But I guess that market is mostly saturated by now.
What I worry about is not the fate of RHEL per se, in the end it's just a distro among others. What I worry about, as a huge FOSS fan, is the fate of RH engineering which is certainly one of the biggest individual upstream FOSS contributors on a lot of places in the stack. By comparison, the Canonical engineering team is absolutely puny. If the work that RH does disappears, we're going to see a lot slower progress in the FOSS ecosystem.
You'll see a lot of preconfigured CentOS images, not RHEL because of the licensing. Red Hat's recent (and sensible) play has been on-prem Kubernetes with OpenShift.
Ubuntu has a long way to go before they reach Red Hat levels of quality assurance.
Red Hat is a lot more than the distros, isn't it?
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> Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention.
Ubuntu don't have JBoss or OpenShift, amongst other things. Neither do SuSE, unfortunately.
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Well yeah, there's CentOS, so a company just needs to step up and provide the level of support RHEL customers expect.
I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in.
I really don't understand this acquisition.
RHEL is just a small piece of the Red Hat puzzle that is sold to enterprises. In some way Red Hat is an exception -- there have been no multi-billion dollar businesses built purely on open source except them. (Or maybe I have missed something.)
At least they didn't get bought by Oracle. All the important people Sun had left within ~6 months of Oracle buying Sun.
This is great news for Canonical.
Well, fuck. I spent the last couple of years completely revamping my UNIX support group. I got rid of all the weak SAs and used a mix of in person and online vendor training plus internal challenges to elevate everyone's skills. We were able to completely repurpose the "Level 3" UNIX engineering group because all the "Level 2" guys no longer needed to escalate to Level 3 for anything.
Critical to that was buying RedHat Learning Subscription and pushing my top guys through RedHat's Certified Architect program. But I'm skeptical but we'd have the same leverage to obtain similar learning discounts from IBM.
Honestly as my org gets more comfortable with pure open source solutions it may be time to just consider Fedora instead, particularly as our workloads are moving from bare metal to VMs to containers it arguably means less and less where the app is hosted anyway.
In the end it may mean RHEL going the way of Solaris as ever dearer license fees combined with a drop in support quality undermines their value proposition.
But I guess that's a problem for the next guy; my org transformation is done so I took a job doing provisioning using Terraform.
This was to be expected. Red Hat had no future as an independent company. Their flagship product RHEL still dominates their revenue 20 years later... But they have already saturated the enterprise Linux server market, and that market is in decline. All attempts to diversify have failed. Openshift and Ansible have potential, but compared to the decline of their core business, it’s too little too late. The current CEO is a peacetime CEO: he managed a successful business competently in fair wheather, but is not fit to navigate the rough seas ahead. This allows him to leave on a victory (“the largest software acquisition ever!”) and go on a book tour or something. Meanwhile IBM can delude themselves a few more years until they’ve finished milking Red Hat’s products for easy growth. Then they will have to face the reality of their situation: they have no real answer to Big Cloud eating their lunch. For now, though, they can pretend this is it.
Do you think Ubuntu has a future as an independent company?
I don’t understand your question, sorry. Can you explain what you mean?
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Yup
This is a massive cash expenditure. IBM's biggest bet to be back into the cloud game. Given the amount of cash involved this might be IBM's last card, at least from an M&A perspective, so this deal needs to work.
RedHat is much smaller than IBM, however far better managed with a clear product roadmap, lean sales and customer support. In a good scenario a reverse takeover will take place and RedHat management will take control and lead new IBM to a better future, however this is very unlikely.
IMO: This is great for RedHat shareholders, terrible for the new IBM co...
There are strong rumors that IBM will be selling/spinning off its services group so perhaps that’s the funding justification?
If this kind of a split were happening it would be more accurate to describe it as the services group spinning off its product department.
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I'm a fan of Red Hat. I am a Red Hat Certified Engineer and contemplating working towards the architect certification. When I heard they aquired the company behind Ansible a few years ago I was excited.
If this deal goes through I'll be super disappointed.
www.redhat.com it's a done deal, sorry for your loss
At a former employer, we were heavily invested in Purify, Quantify et al. When taken over by IBM, the license management cost at our side increased an order of magnitude -- not for the products per se but by the administration of the licenses.
Even though we loved the products, we found it was increasingly not worth it. 'Killed by license management', has a nice ring to it :)
Thanks to CoreOS and all the other teams under RedHat who have done amazing work up until now. To be fair I've used (and enjoyed/been impressed by) your software for free so obviously I'm not owed anything but I'm gonna be looking for alternatives.
I'm suuuuuuuuuper glad I jumped off of CoreOS Container Linux earlier after the acquisition by RedHat and subsequent bundling into Project Atomic. I avoided OpenShift all together for other reasons, mostly complexity. Now I can watch from a relatively relaxed standpoint and start figuring out how to make sure no IBM sneaks into my stack, if they start tanking products. As others have noted, this is more than RHEL. Keep in mind:
- Ansible is GPLv3
- CephFS is GPLv2 w/ some mix of BSD and others
I assume licenses will serve as a canary for when things start shifting. I might even be so bold as to predict some variation of the LICENSE + PATENTS.md clause.
Red Hat does not have CLAs, not does it own all the copyright, on either Ansible or Ceph. It cannot change their licenses unilaterally, that can only happen with permissive (non-copyleft) terms.
Yes, this is true right now, but does not mean it will be true in the future -- I meant to imply that Ansible was the safest, due to it's GPLv3 licensing (from what I understand GPLv2 is more permissive).
My second point was that I expect those terms to change depending on how IBM moves forward, and movement on that front (from the current state of things) should act as a canary.
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Hoping this is false! IBM is the worst of acquirers and they treat their people like utter garbage, especially the more experienced ones.
If there's any truth to this, it means those in charge have basically given up - assuming growth is capped and/or that the big return of a buyout premium would counter recent stock pricing setbacks.
(Update: now officially announced!)
My last startup, blekko, was acquired by IBM in 2015. They treated our people well; many of them still work there.
It takes 6 months to be acquired by IBM, so I don't think recent stock market gyrations have anything to do with it.
My perception is that IBM (and HP, Oracle, etc) will buy a product company, and then IBM-ify it, and then just sit on that product for years with minimal improvements.
That is my fear for Red Hat. Successful product companies are hungry - IBM is not.
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Now official! It's at $190/share vs Friday's $116.68 close
https://www.redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-r...
"- IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community
- Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team"
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52 week high is $177.
Oh no
Red Hat has a significant remote workforce. IBM famously fired theirs. Can we expect IBM to do the same to Red Hat's?
They didn't fire theirs - they ordered them to move to an arbitrary office, most commonly not the closest geographically either, without relocation money. If you didn't move, it was considered a voluntary departure. There was often no room at these offices even for the minority who accepted the moves.
It was/is a deliberate attempt to dispose of senior, less portable people without having to pay layoff charges.
Who needs fusion power when you can run off the Watsons spinning in their graves at relativistic velocity?
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Yes. It will take some time but I'd take an exit package and find a new job.
I've really got to wonder at the people who would stay at a company that treated them like utter garbage ... especially if they're experienced ... and especially in this job market.
Red Hat tends to employ people through offices in low/moderate COL areas or as fully remote. It would have been my #1 prospect after leaving the Bay Area. People who've already established lives in places like Raleigh may not find a comparable job so easily.
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"those in charge have basically given up"
Yes but which company's leadership has given up? If this is the ordinary acquisition model, where the buying company (IBM) leadership stays in charge, then I say it's Red Hat's leadership that's given up. If it's the 'buy a company to get an entirely new leadership team' then it means those in charge of IBM might actually understand their dire situation. But I have no idea if they have that awareness.
Unless the leadership happens to hold quite a lot of shares, their stance isn’t going to matter too much.
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Nice spearfishing from [0]Mozilla:
"Hey @RedHat employees - if working for @IBM isn't your idea of a good time, Mozilla has a bunch of interesting roles we're actively hiring for: https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/?team=Engineering"
[0] https://twitter.com/mike_conley/status/1056693061038825472?s...
Actually Red Hat is exactly like IBM. Huge and slow.
I know the contribution to FOSS from Red Hat is great and all, but their product, RHEL, was a cancer for a modern software development.
Just easier to maintain for sysadmins doesn't make enough excuse for really long release cycle and the worst of all is they keep supporting the old products.
The result is a nightmare development environment for all the programmers who has to workaround the old bugs that was fixed years ago in the upstream but not fixed in the RHEL packages, but they have to use the RHEL packaged software for stupid sysadmin reasons.
What's the alternative? All of the places I've worked that used Red Hat never explicitly looked at the Red Hat support timeline. They looked at their business, the software they used, the features they needed, and based their upgrade cycles around that. They'd only upgrade the major versions of their primary software when a project would benefit and skipped major updates that were problematic. At my current job they're only now upgrading from a 2016 piece of software to 2018, they're also straddling Cent 6.7 and Cent 7.2 and only making moderate progress.
Usually the reason for updating the OS is because new software doesn't run, there's a major feature needed, or supporting the old OS is too much trouble.
But it's not like it's any different on the Windows side. XP stuck around forever. At my previous job they had Win7 on workstations with little to no intention of updating to Win10. On the server side it was all over the place including Windows Server 2003.
I suggest the latest Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS.
Debian stable keep the history of roughly 2 years release cycles. Ubuntu LTS is set to follow strict 2 years release cycle.
Ubuntu seems like a good replacement. We use it, and I greatly appreciate that the compiler is not stuck on barely getting C++11 support.
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"stupid sysadmin reasons" Yeah, who needs stability and consistency? It far more important to be able to jump upon the latest whizz, bang, wheeeeee!
By using the obsolete software versions, it cause instability and inconsistency and a lot of effort will be wasted to workaround the issue rather than solving the real problem.
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by "cancer" do you mean its not shiny and new?
Yes, RHEL6.x is a pain but that's because its old. For what ever reason AWS decided to standardise on that and not 7.x.
The crucial part is this: it works, and when it doesn't, there is a boat load of documentation on why and how to fix it.
Totally agree. RHEL's support windows are FAR too long and result in more problems than they solve. Large businesses wait till the last minute to upgrade then realize that working through a minimum of 5 years (often 10) of changes is extremely hard. This means that you often run unsupported while everyone scrambles to fix all the changes introduced by the upgrade. Cannonical's 5 year support window is much more sensible.
For individuals and small businesses, sure it makes no sense. But large enterprise customers will pay a lot of money for support windows that are far too long. That's why Red Hat (and every other large company) offers them. Even when the publicly available support ends, they still often have hangers-on who will pay even more money to get a few more years support out of them.
Look how slow Redhat moves up their kernel, Redhat simply is the IBM in the open source world!
Having been a linux user for 20 years now, I'm not worried.
Mostly because in the OS market there is enough competition that didn't exist back in the 1990's when RedHat was founded around the Linux kernel. And we continue to have valid choices in the Linux market.
And as we move forward into Kubernetes, we're looking at lightweight OS's to host a single purpose microservice. Most companies don't really need the full features that a full-service Linux OS offers anymore.
Another example of this trend is the declining use of Sendmail and it's alternatives. There are much better ways of handling email now than using Sendmail. Yes, it too was popular in the 1990's, and while people still use it, it's more likely for startups to use something like gmail for employee email, because it's just painless.
> Mostly because in the OS market there is enough competition that didn't exist back in the 1990's when RedHat was founded around the Linux kernel.
I'd disagree; the 90s had a lot more OS diversity in the for-profit sector than we see today.
Agreed. There has been a massive amount of tech consolidation happening lately. I assume as a result of all that overseas cash that got repatriated with the tax changes.
ofc you realise that one of the major contributors to the Kubernetes ecosystem is Redhat.
So IBM now control key elements of k8s setups like etcd (a CoreOS project, ergo a Redhat Project, ergo an IBM project)
At the same time, K8S team has been rapidly standardizing everything and turning it into a very modular system. etcd is pretty much a "done" project, but if it ever goes bad, it can easily be replaced.
If IBM ever takes etcd in a direction that k8s does not like, the k8s fork of etcd will be the one that's relevant going forward.
Red hat has been owned by corporate execs, it's not owned by developers. Made 2.9 billion in 2017. Once that kind of money flows the big offers come from the oligarchs. There is no integrity in corporate business. If they get a big offer, they're going to sell. IBM in a proper world of business shouldn't exist, but patents keep them alive. We will need a new replacement to red hat, but I'm afraid the hyper reliance and patenting IBM will enforce will make this impossible.
Am I the only one cautiously optimistic about this merger? RH has dominated Linux development for too long anyway, pushing systemd, namespaces, procfs and other crap, and making RHEL an overcomplicated jack-of-all-trades O/S which would only run with the specific gcc, glibc, and RH-specific kernel patches and build tools anyway (which is kind of the point of RHEL, and of IBM as well - PTF466735 anyone?). RH now being IBM will make people turn to Debian and derivatives such as Ubuntu and Devuan. The press release on redhat.com talks almost exclusively about "the cloud", but "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together). Why would indie devs and idealists want to contribute their efforts to enslaving people in "the cloud" anyway? "Cloud" stuff is also at odds with user freedom, and only seeks to make software runnable over shitty web frontends for undue profit and privacy invasion, when F/OSS software has been out there in abundance for over a decade. I hope we'll also see some love for the BSDs, and a renewed shared understanding that only POSIX and other standards guarantee long-term autonomy to both individuals and corporations alike.
Your post is mixing arguments with idealism and very specific angles, e.g. on what the cloud is and how it works.
I'm pretty sure RH means something completely different when they talk cloud.
Most of all, I think your post comes down to "RH is bad, systemd is bad, [...] it should die anyway".
> "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together)
Does the physical hardware being on the actual premises or not really have anything to do with "site autonomy" or the granularity of the toolchains?
In fact, can you even buy any viable physical hardware to run on your site that's not already a virtualised "cloud" with the real host OS firmly in the control of your corporate overlords, e.g. Intel ME and AMD PSP?
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the cloud is not simply 'server hosting' because, if that was the case we'd still be calling them VPS'.
"The cloud" is a set of APIs for provisioning but also a bunch of managed services that surround your instances, pub/sub, DNS, load balancers, managed SQL. All of this is almost designed to be a vendor lock-in.
However, disregarding the vendor lock-in: How does my OS integrating with AWS's APIs help my on-prem services?
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RedHat does a great job of being a trusted advisor for companies. Their people are often embedded at customers and are the first stop to ask for advise on anything related to Linux.
Recently RedHat was transitioning from selling the VM based RHEL to the cloud native OpenShift. They used the relationship they had with customers already using RHEL to 'up-sell' them to OpenShift.
IBM already had a SaaS offering for Kubernetes in https://www.ibm.com/cloud/container-service and RedHat adds a strong self-managed offering for Kubernetes in the form of OpenShift.
IBMs revenue comes from consulting but a lot of their profit comes from software https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-split-between-IT-and-consu... They are also a trusted advisor and are great at closing large and complex purchases. This move will allow IBM to sell more software products and therefore increase their margins.
I have a lot of respect for RedHats policy to open source all the software they sell. I expect that policy to continue.
> Second quarter total revenue of $823 million, up 14% year-over-year, or 14% in constant currency
ARR around $3.3 billion. I think they have sold the company very cheap.
Source - https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-repor...
I wouldn't have sold also, but IBM paid an 80% premium. Not exactly cheap.
I admire Red Hat as a company for their principled and uncompromising stance on open source. I contribute to many Red Hat open source projects and even promote their products, because they share my values. Their success directly contributes to the open source ecosystem in many ways, and they have a history of doing the right thing (tm).
I'm not sure how I feel about doing the same thing for IBM.
This is either very good news, or very bad. If Red Hat can truly remain independent and preserve their culture and values, they can achieve a lot more with IBM's money, and hopefully change IBM for the better.
If the culture changes for the worse, it's the end. Many, many people work at Red Hat because of the culture, not the pay (which is average), not to mention community contributors. This is particularly true for their top-tier engineers.
Red Hat's leadership is acutely aware of this, so I'm optimistic.
I can only imagine the discussions going on on their internal mailing lists. Friends of mine who are RH employees have fun stories to tell about epic discussions about much more inconsequential decisions :-)
I grieve the most that this will really weaken the argument for commercial free software. We could always say, look at Red Hat, they don't sell a drop of non-free software. It's possible to be free and commercial!
I doubt Red Hat will continue to operate this way, especially if they are receiving money from IBM's other ventures. I hope there's room for another Red Hat in this world.
Red Hat used to sell non-free software using the freemium model with Redhat Enterprise. Is that no longer the case?
No, RHEL isn't freemium. They sold you access to the source code. You also have the right to redistribute RHEL, which is how CentOS happened.
I understand they did threaten to terminate support if you redistributed, but they couldn't stop you from doing so if you so chose.
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Redhat website confirmed it. https://www.redhat.com/en
Editors: This really should be the top link. Additionally, there's more detail in the email sent to RedHat employees, published here:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-ibm-creating-leading-...
Edit: Notably, from Jim Whitehurst's email:
> ... When the transaction closes, as I noted above, [Red Hat] will be a distinct unit within IBM and I will report directly to [IBM chair, president, and CEO] Ginni [Rometty].
That URL looks like the best one so far, so we'll use it. Thanks!
Assuming RedHat was in a 'sell or die' situation[1] I'm glad it was IBM that stepped in rather than Oracle.
[1] I have no reason to believe that it was a dire situation at RedHat, I make the observation that companies that are meeting their goals and doing what they want, don't generally get acquired just because.
If it was a sell-or-die situation IBM wouldn't have offered such a hefty markup over the market price and they would have used less cash and more shares to pay for it.
I think it's been obvious to everyone for a year or two that someone was going to buy Red Hat; I feel that no small part of their share price rising over the last 18 months has priced in that expectation.
Like everyone else I am mostly pleased that they didn't get bought by Oracle.
Disclosure: I work for a competing company, Pivotal, so feel free to treat my observations as motivated by ... I dunno, actually. I'm looking for a cool French word here but "ennui" isn't quite fitting.
I use Fedora Linux on my laptop. What does this mean for the Fedora Project? Any thoughts on an alternate OS with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora? It takes about 1 GB to boot up Fedora 27 now.
And what's the future for CentOS?
> Any thoughts on an alternate OS
Ubuntu, Debian, Arch? (Or Endless if you want something OSTree/Flatpak-based like Fedora Silverblue.)
> with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora?
Anything not GNOME? Not being (too) snarky — GNOME uses a lot of memory, although I've read they're making some progress recently. Even KDE these days is pretty low in memory usage by default.
NixOS maybe? Don't know about memory footprint, but as a fellow fedora laptop user, I find this distro the most appealing to switch to (arch being the other option, but too high maintenance for my taste).
NixOS is interesting but certainly not the easiest migration, it's a very different way of administering your system. That said, this might be what I chose to do now.
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If you think IBM are going to keep Red Hat's commitments to Fedora or CentOS going you are in for a rude surprise.
Not sure it is time to run yet, but I enjoy using Ubuntu Mate. Xubuntu is a low mem choice as well.
As for alternate Linux distributions, I don't know how similar you want to stay to Fedora, but my current setup would surely conform to your stated requirements: Arch linux, with i3 as window manager. I use st as my terminal emulator. All together, the memory footprint is minimal, and it makes my not-all-that-low laptop specs shine far more than a heavier distribution would have.
If you want something similar to Fedora, dunno. I believe the desktop interface is a big part of the memory usage of most distributions, so unless I'm mistaken in that, wanting low memory usage as well as a nice interface is going to be difficult.
I also use this, and memory footprint is ~100MiB, mostly on the Xorg side. i3 itself + various other components is ~20MiB total.
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Why not consider Open or NetBSD? They can make nice desktops, and OpenBSD is very friendly on laptops. And they are lighter than Fedora and perform much better. And, they use a maximally free license, but this is simply my preference. You may feel different.
I wouldn’t say that OpenBSD is friendly on laptops, especially on laptops made in the past five years or so.
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Yeah, Silverblue is just starting to be really nice. :/
KDE's memory footprint on boot decreased to 400MB or less.
Just go Debian and be done with all this stuff
Good news for Canonical/Ubuntu I guess? I wonder how Linux distro popularity will plot out in next few months.
Now I wonder who will buy Canonical. If/when Shuttleworth will be tired of running it I assume it also will happen. Maybe Microsoft to continue their open-source hat-trick.
Microsoft will probably buy Ubuntu now
Canonical is basically bankrupt
If this happens, I see older engineers targeted by IBM as they have done over the for "cost savings" as part of the acquisition.
RIP Red Hat Linux.
Can't think of any company I'd want less to be a steward of CentOS upstream.
Looks like Ubuntu is about to get much more serious consideration for production workloads.
> Can't think of any company I'd want less to be a steward of CentOS upstream
Oracle
> Oracle
Fair point.
First Microsoft buying GitHub and now IBM buying Red Hat.
I wonder how the next year will be for Linux and open source in general, looks like we are going to have a lot of drama.
Remember when NeXT bought Apple with Apple's money? If there's meaningful Red Hat leadership being put at the helm at IBM as part of the deal, it might not be hideous news. But if it's the usual acquisition, well I cannot imagine more incompatible cultures than IBM and Red Hat, integration seems very unlikely.
Hoping they will stick to this:
"IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team"
I guess this was an important part of the deal, otherwise it wouldn't make much sense.
“Y buys X for it to operate distinctly within Y.” usually doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t imply independence.
R.I.P. Red Hat.
There is a saying in the enterprise software business.
You are a Walmart or becoming one. There is no middle ground.
The enterprise executives do not have the luxury of time or risk appetite to keep doing multi-dollars deals and review MSAs.
In that respective, IBM just extended their life by another 10-15 years. It is a brilliant move by IBM.
No serious enterprise uses an operating system or any piece of enterprise software without costly support and maintenance.
Once they are in, the support and maintenance agreements disappear only if the purchaser goes out of business.
Many comments mistaken redhat as an OS company? They are not. IBM did not buy redhat to get RHEL.
They bought it for the hybrid cloud as clearly stated.
Redhat has openstack platform, cloud formation/manage iq, openshift, ansible, ceph, glusterfs, codeenvy (behind eclipse che),... Etc
I am worried about the future of the numerous Open Source projects. I mean, why did they sell RedHat? The bet on OpenShift does not seem to pay off then. I always saw RedHat as the "enterprisy" OSS company that helps moving all these Java monoliths to the cloud. Even more problematic is the influence this aquisition has on the landscape of OSS in the cloud space, especially since CoreOS, RHEL and CentOS are now run by IBM.
Wow this would be a very expensive purchase for IBM , redhat is currently worth about 20% of IBM's market cap
IBM has been very open source friendly over the last 20 years, more so as of recently.
Many companies are OSS friendly, but I think being OSS friendly is different than building your whole organization on OSS. RH does the latter, many-many companies are the former.
The problem (as an ex-IBMer) is that that friendlyness is only in parts of the company; much of IBM is open-source hostile.
As a result of this news, though, wouldn't you be inclined to suspect that the hostile faction just took a massive blow?
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"IBM further says, "Upon closing of the acquisition, Red Hat will join IBM's Hybrid Cloud team as a distinct unit, preserving the independence and neutrality of Red Hat's open source development heritage and commitment, current product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, and unique development culture. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat's current management team. Jim Whitehurst also will join IBM's senior management team and report to Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat's headquarters, facilities, brands and practices.""
Give it a year or two..
In other words, RH is too big to merge quickly. When it's all said and done (in at most 3 years), expect a new post talking about "increased synergy" where RH will go through major a reorg to be merged into the borg.
This is all very sad.
Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.
To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it.
RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn't necessarily open, and it's not yet really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)
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I'm sure that you can draw a line where it does not count as "core product", but Eclipse has to count as something.
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OpenBMC is worked on by the OzLabs group (which is the core of some of their mainframe BMCs), as well as lots of work around POWER9 and s390. Don't get me wrong, they are a proprietary shop at the end of the day, but they do an incredible amount of free software work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_(file_system)
https://openpowerfoundation.org/
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They have many (you might argue some are somewhat autist but there are): https://developer.ibm.com/code/open/projects/
And they also do several contributions, e.g. openstack, linux kernel
I would agree that IBM is not pop enough and that their motivation is usually not based on ideals or a social contract.
EDIT: I forgot IBM Blockchain, which you might think it is not "core" just because the company is still divided between areas like services, consulting and hardware...
https://github.com/IBM-Blockchain
There was an era when IBM's "core products" were hardware. I think today their "core product" is consulting.
Open source hardware exists but is rare. I don't know what it means to open source consulting?
Does IBM have any core products?
Eclipse
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Their J9 JDK alongside with WebSphere AS.
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Went they the primary driver of eclipse?
(Don't want to use my regular id for this)
We were transitioning from an old IBM app stack to a Red Hat stack. I was spending a lot of time trying to make this happen.
This news makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time - it is so ironic.
The only remaining question to know is how many layers of shit, unnecessary complexity will IBM add on top of the preexisting shit, unneccesary layers already added by Red Hat on their products.
simple software that’s easy to use is anathema to companies like red hat. to the extent you can keep software simple, you won’t need red hat, pivotal, etc. these support companies have every incentive to make you dependent on them. think about that next time you reach for one of the technologies they peddle.
Wow, if this is true, my condolences. I was a former IBMer and Red Hat folks, your world is about to be turned upside down.
This is terrible news. I hope its not true.
IBM like Redhat is a long time contributor and both are commercial companies driven by profits and shareholders so this does not change things.
However no one can deny Redhat has a disproportional influence in pushing its interests that may not always be in the community's best interests. These now move to IBM.
The bigger problem is the growing tilt of open source towards corporate interests so much so that dependence on individual companies passes without notice or scrutiny.
This is perhaps not the end result that motivated the initial community of open source contributors over the last 20 years and if we do not find ways to motivate the next generation open source will likely become a shell of itself, propped up by paid contributors and self interest.
The real story here is that cloud is killing them both.
Where do you see any of that represented in Red Hat's business performance? Their growth has been strong the last five years and shows no sign of high stress or decline being imminent. They're tracking to solidly double their sales over four years from the end of fiscal 2015.
you should read the latest earnings statements, growth was declined and a huge miss of estimates
hence the IBM merge, Redhat probably felt they couldn't do it anymore on their own
I think when you figure out why Amazon is currently losing to Microsoft you will also understand why Red Hat, just like Docker, was completely crushed by Google, and why IBM, despite trying super hard, wasn't even a player until now.
Talking about procrastination I see a big problem for us user of FOSS desktop: RH need to be on GNU/Linux desktop just to play a SUN-like role. IBM have no need for that.
So after Ubuntu ditch desktop and actual "Gnome disaster" I think things will go even worse, leaving us with no more generic GNU/Linux desktop for end-users, pushing us again on a small tech/geek niche, witch in turn push end-users, many "power users" included, to the cloud-mobile world so delete the last bastion of digital freedom we have. On desktop we have our system, we control our files, we decide when and how to upgrade, what to install or uninstall. On mobile vendor choose for us and we are powerless.
For those of us running Red Hat or Fedora on IBM POWER, though (I run Fedora 28 on a Talos II), this is probably a good sign of future commitment. Hopefully they don't screw up Fedora maintaining the enterprise side.
Out of curiosity what sort of workloads are you running on a Talos II?
Just using it as a big workstation. Firefox, Krita, LibreOffice. The software has improved to the point where it can realistically be a daily driver (that can also compile Firefox at -j24 on this octocore SMT-4 machine in about a half hour).
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A big loser here is Microsoft. IBM has basically just purchased Linux at the time when Microsoft has finally embraced it.
Nah, they'll end up picking up Canonical. I'm guessing this acquisition was preemptive.
Every aquisition I've been a part of immediately resulted in a massive brain drain as everyone who made the aquired company great jumps ship. I wonder if Redhat's competitors are licking their chops.
This affects on so many open source projects in addition to RHEL. ANSIBLE, Ceph, OpenShift, Linux kernel, JBoss as well as everything Red Hat acquired from CoreOS.
I hope CoreOS succeeds regardless. It has built a very nice ecosystem around it.
Honestly? I think IBM isn’t as relevant as they’d like to be, so they’re buying a Nike. They haven’t thought about the details, or worked out the long term. It could still go either way, but RH will chamge some over time. The real problem will probably be the perception, largely thanks to Oracle and it’s behavior with Sun. Does make you wonder if open source is a sustainable business model in the ultra-long-term.
I haven't made it through all of the comments on this thread yet but, in case it hasn't been mentioned, HN'ers who are using AWS may be interested in knowing that, Amazon Linux (i.e., the official Amazon Linux AMIs) also appears to mostly be a clone of RHEL.
I can't be certain as I've just barely played with it but, from first appearances, it sure seemed very similar to RHEL and CentOS!
I don't know if AWS is starting with RHEL and rebuilding everything from source and "re-branding" it like CentOS does or if they're starting with CentOS and then rebuilding and rebranding that -- or perhaps I'm completely incorrect and they aren't doing anything of the sort -- but any future changes or decisions (by IBM/Red Hat) that impact the development or future existence of CentOS could very well affect the future of Amazon Linux as well.
That's certainly something to think about if you use the Amazon Linux distribution, just like I -- and, I imagine, a ton of other CentOS users -- am wondering right now about the future of CentOS.
The good thing is that IBM is old and slow and any decisions that might affect the future existence of CentOS will likely take a few years to actually be realized. By that I mean that I don't think we'll see 7.x affected by this acquisition -- or probably even the first couple of point releases of CentOS 8 -- but, at this point, it's anybody's guess whether 8 will live out its normal/expected lifetime and still be around 10 years after release.
As a side note, recently I've been thinking that an announcement of the release of 8.0 should be arriving any day now. I'm kinda curious if this acquisition has affected (delayed) the release of 8.0 in any way.
> release of 8.0
"beta of 8.0" is what I meant.
Good thing we're using CoreOS instead of Red Hat.
/me looks at the CoreOS article on Wikipedia
Fuck.
relevant line:
> The CoreOS corporation was purchased by Red Hat in January 2018 for a purchase price of $250 million.[71]
$50 says someone like Microsoft or Google responds to this by buying Canonical.
At this point, Microsoft might as well do its own Debian-based distro. What would they need from Canonical, really? Experienced people? I suspect it'd be much cheaper to pull a Hejlsberg with them.
> What would they need from Canonical, really?
Staff, existing customer relationships and credibility.
You could make a hell of a lot more than fifty bucks on that prediction.
Why would either of them need them?
Microsoft likely. I think Google is too smart to actually buy Canonical, considering that it is an antiquated distro overall.
Has Richard Stallman responded yet? I'd be interested to see if any of the legends of Linux have commented and what they have to say.
RMS is usually eminently practical and pragmatic. Since this has not caused any practical change yet, there is nothing to comment on – it’s all speculation, and RMS usually does not speculate.
The only positive side I can think of is that, Microsoft did not buy RH before IBM does.
This is a threat to OSS, sadly.
Maybe Google or Amazon will buy Canonical soon?
Microsoft would have actually been better. They're at least still a product development company. IBM at this point is just consultants and their sales ilk. They'll gut Red hat.
Second that.
Half a year ago I was still at RedHat, and we were joking around with colleagues, that either the big bet on OpenShift/kubernetes starts paying off, or somebody buys us.
We joked that Microsoft under Satya Nadella would actually be quite a good fit :D
I see IBM as being worse than MS as a company. They have steadily imploded over the last 20 years.
I don't want Google or Amazon anywhere near Canonical.
I'm not sure Amazon would be worse than the likes of bloodsucking PE (private equity) owning Suse.
Why?
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I'd place my bets that MS would buy Canonical since they already have a relationship.
Why do they need to sell it to begin with?
Maybe Google or Amazon will buy Canonical soon?
What makes you think that would be a good thing?
What makes you think the poster thinks of it as a good thing?
One word: SCO.
It's amazing if you consider how differently this sort of acquisition would have been viewed, way back during the SCO v. IBM [0] era.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internation....
IBM have a consistent, decades long history of acquiring superb firms and then mismanaging them into marketplace irrelevance.
My main worry is that this will end up like the Novell acquisition of SUSE. 10 years on and there is still scar tissue running through SUSE and openSUSE. Lots of bad blood was stirred up (and in many ways this is what cause the drop in interest in SUSE). IBM has hardly had the best history when it comes to treating its acquisitions (or its employees for that matter).
On the other hand, I know quite a few folks who work for IBM and do great free software work. I want to think that RedHat would be treated like OzLabs -- a fairly isolated group that gets to continue working on all of the free software work they have always done.
Here's hoping it works out. The survival of RedHat (or any large free software company) is very important to the longevity of the projects that we all depend on.
[I work at SUSE, though I wasn't around during the Novell years I have heard plenty of horror stories. And I've used GroupWise.]
God help us.
Will there be any independent open source/open source friendly company that isn't controlled by some corporate giant?
The BSDs are all open source and not tied to anyone. Since operating systems are literally key components of being free, this truly matters. Red Hat had too much of a grip on Linux (kernel), the userland and much more. systemd, while an atrocity on its own, has now become a requirement for certain userland software projects, which is heresy. So much for the tenet of a software program doing one thing well.
Unless I'm mistaken, almost all of open source is driven by corporate development. The linux kernel is an alright example: roughly 85% of development seems to be sponsored by a corporation[1]. I felt a little weird when I first learned that
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2610207/open-source-softwa...
Probably if things go wrong, every community will just fork the code and move on.
The problem being that forked projects rarely get much traction. Look at Devuan. Only the very hard core Debian fanboys moved over. Sure, it's nice not having systemd, but the project will never have the user base and developer support that its parent project enjoys. Maybe, though, with RH being bought out, people will take a second look. I've always favoured Debian over RH for servers, as the upgrade path is dead simple and almost always works. RH/CentOS is a tough row to hoe in this regard comparitively.
Here's my take since we're all weighing in and are all in different levels of shock: IBM needs Redhat to stay relevant. The way I think about it is in a few ways. 1) IBM's stock price has been tanking because I think they're not investing in new products but just cutting expenditures to meet stupid Wall-Street targets. But with the introduction of RedHat they get new "blood" as it were. Who knows, what if they make the CEO of RedHat the CEO of IBM a la Satya Nadella and Microsoft?
They have said that RedHat would remain an independent part of IBM as part of their cloud push. Let's take them at their word unless they prove us wrong. Also, if nothing else, this could give RedHat even more money to make ambitious bets -- perhaps we might see Power9 systems running Fedora soon?
In the end I think this is, on the whole, a good thing. Now, does MS buy Canonical?
What do you mean “a la Satya Nadella and Microsoft”? He didn’t join MSFT through an acquisition. Did you mean Jobs/NeXT/Apple?
The analogy isn’t 1:1 but I think the core of MS and what he was doing in the cloud division might as well had him an outsider. MS was still highly Windows first all others second under Ballmer. Under Nadella he bet the future of the company on cloud and it’s been the right choice. What if they do the same with a changing of the guard — not immediately but eventually?
Interesting to see no comments praising this at all. I wonder what happened to RedHat for them to make this decision.
50% premium on stock price, or $10B+ of extra money
This feels like Sears buying KMart - One ailing firm buying another in the hopes that scale will fix everything...
I think KMart bought Sears and then renamed itself as Sears.
Wow. Not good for Red Hat in the long-term. Feels like the Sun takeover by Oracle a few years ago. Maybe they can maintain their efficient internal structures, but i have the feeling they will get caught in IBM internal power struggles and politics and lose their hands-on problem solving power.
I look forward to IBM marketing taking over.
"yum, powered by Watson"
"dnf, powered by Watson"
System/D, powered by Tivoli Cluster Manager
This will only work out if IBM beefs up it's data centers to clone AWS (Lambda, Batch, S3, RDS, SQS, Fargate), gobbles Netifly, then puts mainframe DB2 in the cloud next to commodity servers. Also needs to open the ZOS toolchain and get a modern syntax and tooling around COBOL.
Tried IBM cloud when it was "released".
50% of the portal pages were failing due to their own cross origin policies.
Only a idiot would touch such an incompetent cloud system.
I worked for a company that used bluemix PAAS (cloudfoundry based back in 2016). We were early adopters(customers), the service was not really stable at that time (but we were not in production yet) but it improved and ended up quite stable before we left for different reasons. I think I preferred (cost aside) their PAAS offering to some competitors like AWS beanstalk.
This has been my experience too, and not when it was released. I was playing with some of their APIs last month and it was horrible: CORS issues, high latency, random failures or server errors for no reason.
Will this warrant an Our Incredible Journey [1] entry?
Not technically an exit, I guess, at least not for most of the staff that start to work for Big Blue in a month.
[1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
I figured bringing up that Tumblr will get flagged or at least downvoted, but it is amusing to ponder what would be the biggest, most high-profile acquisition in tech to merit an entry. Doubly funny when the firms involved aren't Silicon Valley startups but old enterprises.
I guess any publicly traded company is by definition at risk of being bought (or merged in this case) without notice or even much public speculation -- but this one feels particularly surprising as I'd been assuming much of Red Hat's value for its customers was its corporate-friendly support arrangements combined with its apparent independence from the traditionally-perceived excessively-corporate heavyweights.
The arguably customer-hostile licensing changes at Red Hat over the last few years are possibly an indicator of a shift in company culture.
On the other side, I've actually felt positively towards IBM since the 1990's when they started to commit heavily to a lot of free software efforts.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they buy you."
I would feel a lot better about this if their other recently acquired properties showed a better user experience, especially weather underground and the weather channel.
I'm not an IBM hater by any means. My FIL was a beemer; I have a good friend who is still one, along with various others I've known through my life. I cut my teeth on IBM mainframes, and my nostalgia for things like xterm stem from that.
But their recent track record is troubling. To an outsider it seems like they haven't formed a cohesive corporate strategy, and they've been making things up quarter to quarter.
I don't feel good about this, I'm sorry to say. I hope I'm wrong.
I am so sad about this. There is nothing good that I see coming out of this, but I hope that's just my bias. Red Hat has been a huge contributed to Linux and open source for years, I want to keep my Fedora!!
I completely agree. I feel the same about MS buying Github, too. We are seeing so much consolidation in so many markets, the only true outcome will be that it will be a worse environment for the rest of us.
So...how does this - if at all - impact linux (running smoothly) on thinkpads? From what i hear, beyond the normal open source contributors, numerous redhat engineers contribute towards fundamental device drivers for the thinpad platform of laptops...which, as i undestand it, why linux distros run soooo smoothly on for example my thinkpad t420. Perhaps my thought is selfish, but i love me some thinkpads - specifically because they run linux sooo nicely. So, will ibm force these guys to focus on other stuff? Or, am i worried for nothing?
The Thinkpad brand has been owned by Lenovo since around 2006.
only time will tell i guess.
Thinkpads are still nice machines to run not only linux on, but also openBSD. (most, if not all openBSD dev's run thinkpads as their development machines).
Hmmm, i didn't know that about the openBSD devs. Good to know. I'll have to take good ol' openBSD for a little test drive on my thinkpad. Cheers!
Expect business as usual for a year. Any changes will occur after then.
That blog post from cormier scares me. Its so cheerleading and the use of "we" like any one besides the employees at RedHat get a piece of that buyout. "Opensource is here to stay." ... Im not holding my breath. But I am bullish on the possibilities. If IBM doesnt F this up I hope they realize that people dont have negative feelings about them like Amazon and Google. People want a tech company that is more tech and less politics. IBM dont do anything special just have a simple payment structure with a product that works.
I really don't understand this. Redhat has been very profitable lately, what do they stand to gain from this? Why do they need cash so badly, what are they investing in?
Their success is so dependent on having management that understands how unique their business model is, I just can't understand why they'd be so desperate for cash that they'd risk screwing that up. Even if you have confidence that it's going to be fine for the next 5 years, what about 15 years from now? They've signed their soul away.
They don't need the cash, they want the cash. What management and shareholders stand to gain from it is cashing out. That's the way business works. Not saying it's the way things should be, just the way they are.
I don't really understand how IBM keeps rolling along, as they outsource more and more of their workers and kill off entire divisions of their best-known products. They don't really make software anymore, they don't really make hardware. Their cloud offerings are an also-ran behind Oracle. They have a massively overhyped, marketing-driven AI division. Mostly they seem to do the awful kind of IT consulting that the other H1B sweatshops engage in, but perhaps at a slightly more prestigious level.
I kind of wonder how many of the people here bemoaning this buyout, also buy into the vc model, where the ultimate 'goal' for most startups is a buyout by a bigger company.
Left CentOS about 4 years ago for Ubuntu, never looked back. Debian is a better system, Ubuntu is a very nice consistent distro. You should check out Proxmox, also debian based, very nice alternative for containers in small-medium deploys. Cheers and open-source on! EDIT: AGAIN down voted for no good reason! Is this automatic? How does this work? Cheerio, will log off for another six months, if anybody can suggest another real hacker's forum I'd be very grateful! TIA
Red Hat has contributed so much to open source projects. Even if you don't use their distribution, their contributions are present in countless initiatives and projects.
When I was at IBM my laptop ran RedHat enterprise. Was the brightest spot in working for a miserable company like IBM. I miss that now that I am forced to use Windows 7.
Fuck. RH seemed like a good company, and for it to go into a slow wasting death at IBM is a bummer.
Can someone help me understand... What exactly do IBM and Oracle do? I assume they are mostly hired to build software and do software/hardware/networking/database services. How much of their business is government contracts? Everyone here is talking about how nobody enjoys hiring them but they are billion-dollar companies... I have never worked in the public sector nor at a conglomerate so I am unable to comprehend this.
nobody got fired for buying IBM/Oracle/SAP.
usually, IBM is used for very large enterprise projects and it is usually done at a "high level". (aka, architecture et al, not direct implementation).
IBM is a slow, corporate monster, but it is very good at doing high, exec level consulting.
Time to update the FreeBSD Handbook, I suppose:
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D17745
Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321937
They failed at PC. They failed at Cloud They failed with Watson They failed with Bluemix They ...... with Redhat.
In game theory, there are two types of players: Finite and Infinite. They are in the long run for sure and definitely they don't have pure strategy just a mixed one that doesn't go anywhere but stay where is it, until there's no one else playing the game anymore. IBM stands for ( I Bullshit Millions)
IBM had power and if anyone remembers it was also part of cell architecture team along with sony and Toshiba. I worked with yellow dog linux the official linux distro for sony ps3 . IBM at that point was still pushing for Red hat instead of investing in yellow dog which was powerpc centric. Red hat fedora later dropped support for powerpc. So in all IBM hardware failed and now it is trying to go is way?
Oh shit. This is one of the worst things I can imagine.
Well, I can easily imagine something worse, like for example Oracle buying it... ^__^;
Or EMC...
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This is terrible news, I really hope this deal does not go through, get blocked by shareholders or by anti-trust laws.
I also remember that IBM is not doing good - profits are decreasing and their software and services division fail to produce any innovation for the last years.
Did IBM need to buy whole RH to strengthen their cloud offering? Couldnt they just partnered with RH cloud division, leaving RH Core team independent?
I can see independent software vendors like Heptio and Canonical being the main beneficiary of this deal.
IBM can sweat the old large companies but they have no credible cloud offering and this doesn't change that. Converting on-prem to kubernetes and using a proper cloud like Google, AWS or Microsoft without also paying steep margin to IBM would seem to be more attractive.
Welp, just as I got hired to work at Red Hat. :(
RH has been full of corporate drones for a while. You'll fit right in after the acquisition.
Well, thank you for the uncalled-for insult!
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Can anyone walk me through the reasoning behind all this IBM hatred? What's going on? I thought they just sell mainframes.
IBM is a sales-driven company that mainly focuses on closed-source proprietary software. Red Hat is an engineer-focused, innovation driven company that's completely built around the open-source Linux kernel.
The two worlds just seem incompatible to me, and I assume a lot of people share the same concern as I do.
Try to use something made by IBM and then tell us if you like it.
1. DB2 is a damn good database imho. 2. And J9 was the fastest JVM when I benchmarked it about a year ago using jmh. 3. And I think Websphere Liberty is a damn fine app server also. 4. I really like Power based CPUs. 5. Talos is made possible because of the open approach that IBM had in creating the power platform. 6. I think loopback is pretty cool also.
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I'm of two minds to this. I have a personal POWER6 running AIX and it handles my main hosting and mail. It's a great box and I love the hardware, but the IBM salesdroids would never talk to me (I do all my business through a VAR), and the CUoD nonsense and having to use a whole separate HMC to manage the single LPAR is obnoxious.
On the other hand, I absolutely love my Talos II. It's not an IBM machine, but it's engineered by them; the POWER9 is IBM, a lot of the OpenPOWER and PowerNV stuff is still as IBM designed it, and IBM contributes hardware support.
So I understand this feeling when dealing with IBM as a vendor. They suck. But I think IBM hardware is solid and their R&D is top-notch, and I'd buy IBM again (just not from them).
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No, IBM isn't going to be good for Linux. RedHat as an independent company supported a lot of efforts to make Linux better overall, including reverse engineering hardware drivers, which most companies won't care about in the least. I don't trust IBM to continue that, so it will be a major setback to Linux efforts.
Judging by IBM’s history over the last 20 years I suspect this is akin to putting Satan at the wheel and giving him a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Several layers of abstraction down the line I get the feeling this will hurt us ansible and centos users now they have been pulled under the umbrella.
What happened to companies standing tall and alone?
They will put the Watson marketing department and the salespeople to work and cut off any meaningful tech. Sigh.
Seriously the amount of Watson hype IBM is spinning is astounding. Recently went to a vendors sales presentation on IBM Rhapsody, and they are touting some sort of rudimentary interactive agent, as powered by 'Watson'.
So basically we are getting the consolidation of companies that bother to spend money on FOSS.
This is what happens when everyone expects to use the work of others for free without paying a dime.
Eventually the companies go looking for buyers with deep enough pockets to support them.
Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Facebook,..., take your pick.
I have to wonder if folks aren't making more of this news that is really there. I mean besides a lot money changing hands and the usual process of IBM taking on a lot of employees and eventually laying many of them off.
Could anyone venture to predict how this might effect the wider Linux ecosystem?
Hi all, I'm a reporter with Bloomberg. I'm keen to track the acquisition and how it's being received, especially from the Red Hat end. If you're an employee and would like to chat, please reach out. I can keep it completely anonymous. gerritdevynck@protonmail.com
Thank you!
So, with SUSE getting sold to some equity firm and Red Hat being bought by Oracle's slightly less evil twin brother, is Canonical really the only "independent" Linux OS vendor left? And here I thought this was going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop™...
We're in the middle of a rollout of CoreOS. We'll finish the deployment, but won't be going in on any of the differentiators like locksmith. If only to make our possible migration to either (1) Debian or (2) The inevitable fork of Container Linux easier.
Kind of surreal news honestly, my interest in this is about like I would imagine if I was going to a Monster Truck show and found out several drivers would be absolutely plastered the whole time: I'm pretty sure something very bad is going to happen.
Nooooooooooo.
We have been preparing to move from Windows to RHEL. We are pretty far along in the process, but there is still time to switch distros. This is primarily for database and web servers. Does anyone have any recommendations on a different distro?
I see that Linus retiring from kernel development for a few days has indeed massive consequences.
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18281465
This is a cloud play ... But they're like late by a decade, hmm interesting times!
IBM's market cap is a little more than 100B so far. It costs more than 30B to acquire RH, that means IBM realize that if it doesn't do something useful, it will sink.
RH maybe the only one that's worth of purchasing and IBM can afford.
tips Fedora
Welp, there goes any chance Research Triangle Park ever had of being a major tech hub.
It already is a major tech hub (top 10 in the nation, pretty close to top 5). But I agree that this isn't a good sign for RTP.
This is an HN black-bar-worthy event (given the OSS implications).
-- longtime CentOS/Fedora user
What will happen to the parts of IBM and Red Hat which overlap? If there is competing tech which adds to IBM's bottom line then chances are that is what IBM will keep. It will be interesting to know what those areas are.
> It will be interesting to know what those areas are.
JBoss vs WAS will be a major thing where they are most directly competing. Java, especially in its EE incarnation, is not so hot on HN but massively important in the enterprise.
As a Corp buyer of both, it seems like one dinosaur buying another. When IBM (Or CA or Oracle or any other old school firm) buys another company, it almost always results in underinvestment in product and worse support.
I haven't felt this way since March 25th, 2014.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115
Red Hat already had too much grip on Linux, it will be interesting how this all plays when IBM steps in.
In other shocking news Poeterring now works for IBM? Can we blame IBM for systemd in the future?
It's not about IBM at all. We have AWS/Azure/GCP out there. IBM and Red Hat? That reminds me Intel+samsung or Nokia+Qt when there are already Android/iOS/WP.
Wondering how this is going to affect their recruiting pipeline. I submitted an application myself last week but now have absolutely no interest in being a guest at this feast.
I probably can understand the motivation from IBM side. Most big/great companies have a long term vision and strategy. I did not get Redhat, is it good to join IBM?
What has just happened??
Was there some behind-the-door takeover, from a friend to a friend? Or a pressure from investors like MS with Nokia? It just doesn't make any other sense...
RH fell behind the times. Their paradigm of a stable though an older kernel was suitable for the times when kernel wasn't that stable and things in the industry were developed slower than today. I work in a big enterprise space and usually we do Ubuntu if we can and SUSE Enterprise if we can't :), i recently tried Docker/Kubernetes on a recent RHEL - looking at the kernel version i already didn't expect the stuff to work and of course it didnt work (no complete namespaces features support). Their push for their own custom software platform instead is a good match for IBM.
You know you can run your own kernel, right?
Good luck IT-blessing kernel changes at BigCo-s. And what would be the purpose of a BigCo buying RHEL if one has to mock around with kernel afterwards? Anyway though, the RH not being a cloud player that has been making it obsolete too.
I think Microsoft should buy Ubuntu now, and we are all set.
Please don't give anyone any ideas.
Hopeful outcome of this, provided IBM realizes it is the student in this situation:
IBM's historical reputation coupled with Red Hat's proven success and products creates a serious competitor to Microsoft at the small-to-medium enterprise level. As Red Hat gains share, other corporate Linux flavors ride the rising tide, and Linux finally captures the long tail.
Further out, Microsoft transitions to being a device company a-la Apple. Bill Gates comes back to save the floundering company but insists that each device offer mechanized vaccinations, leading to skyrocketing prices and general shunning from the populace, which has gradually devolved into rabid anti-vaccination fervor. Microsoft fails, and is ultimately embraced, extended, and extinguished by IBM/Red Hat.
They should have taken over docker. Instead, they went old fashioned. Fine. But this probably doesn’t scare competition away (MS, AWS, Google).
Just glad I jumped ship to FreeBSD a year ago. Sad that Ansible is involved in this though. We were just considering switching from Chef.
I am living in an alternate Universe now?
-ss
P.S. Sad news.
They failed with watson, They failed with Bluemix They .... with Redhat.
I don't think that's a good move from Redhat perspective.
My 0.02:
IBM:Oracle=RH:Sun
(question from a non-native English speaker: is the above interpreted as IBM is to Oracle as RH is to Sun ?)
Bad times are coming for open source.
IBM is to RedHat what Oracle was to Sun
I still fail to see how this will help Red Hat achieve "even more", as they claim in the statement. Sad day!
Well Canonical - if you were waiting for the right moment to push hard and take Red Hat's business this is it.
So now everyone will be wearing blue pyjamas and talk about Watson while not delivering anything.
Seriously.
Can anyone explain why this would be good?
Terrible news for scientific computing :(
I am extremely worried for Fedora. I don't see IBM allowing RH to support us with servers and employees.
Does this mean they will turn the super good red hat documentation in IBM style super useless documentation?
Hmmm - even less happy about systemd and all the other red had stuff that's been pumped into linux.
I dunno. IBM was pretty generous with the operating system when they invented the PC in the first place.
Maybe IBM can re-acquire ThinkPad from Lenovo too. Red Hat traditionally uses ThinkPads internally.
Red Hat employees traditionally use Macs and Windows PCs.
Is this really the case? I had always heard that part of the reason ThinkPads have such good Linux support is their use internally at Red Hat (who pushed the relevant code upstream).
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Oh boy, am I going to have a field day ribbing my Fedora-sporting friends about their IBM PCs ...
In retrospect I'm surprised this didn't happen a long time ago. Good lucky RH brothers.
I had to mentally check the calendar to see if it was April 1. (Sadly, it is not.)
How easy is it to switch to Ubuntu instead of upgrading my web server to CentOS 7?
Colocation of mainframe and commodity compute is huge if they can pull it off.
can someone explain to me what will happen tomorow at market opening ? Currently redhat is quoted 114$, IBM announced they will buy all share at 190$. will it be tradable tomorow morning at market opening ?
Oh my god
Hearing this, nothong else than a big f word comes out of my mouth.
What the expletive! (Awesome, really didn’t see it coming though!)
IBM is where Unisys was in 1990, this is not positive for Red Hat.
Bad news.
Sure, there are ways you could argue it could work well.
But, IBM would have to change.
Good luck with that.
I am having a feeling that Dell might buy Canonical soon.
Just started a new job at Red Hat around a year ago. I kept thinking "this is too good to be true".
It was. Good luck everyone, massive layoffs, salary cuts, and destruction of benefits coming soon I bet.
RH + IBM is like making a bad thing much much worse.
Like ten years after they should have done this.
Who do people dislike more : Oracle or IBM?
Does this have regulatory approval already?
why so many people want to work on their own project when whey work at IBM, I bet the job must be so boring there
Tomorrow: Microsoft acquires canonical :P
The week after: Ubuntu LTS ditched, Ubuntu gets forced updates; https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows returns 200 OK, containing Windows 10 source code :)
Proud to be part of Americas 5 companies!
Can the shareholders block this somehow?
For a large public corporation usually a clear majority of shares are held as pure investment by big institutional investors like pension companies. Their goal is to turn a small amount of money into a large amount of money without too much risk. So they have no reason to block this sort of deal.
Moreover, such companies are often desperate to minimise overheads on operations. Once upon a time they'd employ dozens of specialists, now they're relying on computer models as much as possible to reduce costs and don't much care about what's actually driving the price changes that the model is looking at.
Boards at big companies actually now know this. Suppose you're the board of a big corp and you'd like $10M each even though you didn't do a good job? Just write up paperwork saying you propose that you get paid $10M extra each because of diddly-dee, put it up for a vote by shareholders with a recommendation that they vote "Yes". A few smaller shareholders are paying attention, they'll vote "No". The big institutions are entirely on auto-pilot, and will follow your "Yes" recommendation, your vote passes, you now get $10M with no effort. Giving the board a pile of money for no reason might bankrupt the company. Not your problem, the shareholders voted for it.
For the pension company making your shareholders $10 and then asking for $1 to cover overheads from actual specialists (10%) is seen as worse than making your shareholders $8 and then asking for 10¢ to cover overheads from a few pencil pushers (1.25%) even though in the first scenario the shareholder kept $9 and in the second they only got $7.90. Nobody wants to pay 10%. The result was foreseeable but it's hard to say if it could have been prevented.
The Red Hat board will recommend shareholders accept the offer. Big institutions will (and in this case in my opinion quite rightly) automatically agree and so it doesn't matter what a handful of small private shareholders do.
Sure, those are the ones having to sell their shares to IBM, but IBM would pay a premium and before anouncement discuss with key investors.
Good bye last true open source company!
Big BlueHat
Please no.
oohhh..maybe we can finally get some laptop drivers written for linux!
Assuming you are thinking of Thinkpads, IBM hasn't owned that since 2006.
At least it’s not Oracle.
Good news for Debian :)
Ugh. Terrible news. Better than by MS or Oracle though. Just.
I had to check twice if I hibernated and it was April 1st.
TL;DR IBM just bought a controlling interest in almost every Linux based system on the planet, and thus all the big companies making money with Open Source.
This is fine.
RIP Red Hat.
.
Oh, no!
Another one bites the dust
Welp, there goes Fedora!
fork?
The articles (and Stalman interviews) happening recently pointed to this situation. Open Source, as adopted currently, is a flawed model that valors corporate protection more than end-user freedom.
github is now sourceforge. redhat is now suse Linux. etc.
all the little benefits you got having an apache or bsd license over gpl will start to bite you now. Case in point: every major company has a opensource executive whose only job is to make sure all projects are using closed-source-permissive licenses.
> Open Source, as adopted currently, is a flawed model that valors corporate protection more than end-user freedom.
I see your point, and I mostly agree.
I would like to differentiate between Open Source organizations - like Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation or Mozilla Foundation - and mixed organizations like Oracle (owns MySQL), RedHat (owns too many to list), etc.
The first ones represent the pure Open Source approach. Were the software and how it better serves humanity is their main concerns. The second ones are just business that see in Open Source and gratis (free as in beer) software a way to get a bigger user base and to kill any possibility of competitors from the bottom as new entries cannot compete as easily with products that you do not need to pay for.
Real Open Source foundations are fundamental for a functional global software industry. The other ones bring value, but they use Open Source projects as a weapon against competitors, not as something for the good of its users. And that ones are the ones that value corporate protection more than end-user freedom.
most projects on those incubators are there to die a slow death after being abandoned by the group you call "open source corporations"
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RedHat had a good reputation as a place to work. Meanwhile, when I worked at IBM my health insurance contribution for a family of four was $1k a month
Plus the wonderful 401k match once a year plus the "colocation" scandal etc, etc.
This reminds me of an article[1] I wrote predicting shifting trends in Open Source development, in particular of core infrastructure tools.
There is a huge ripe opportunity for a new company/non-profit to step in and set precedence on the future of developer tools. People don't "Dream Big" anymore, and having the biggest OSS companies absorbed by the most proprietary of companies is a perfect example of hope being lost. I hope we can revert this trend, who wants to help?
1. https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-par...
I hope all companies using opensource software would contribute back either by returning some percent of their profit or in-terms of work-force.
It's like many companies take, but doesn't give back.
Time for an increased focus on productivity and deadlines and shareholder return until all talent leaves from burn out.
Good news for any tech company looking for talent in the next few years.
HELP, I have a big question : The buyout will go to the shareholders, that is a deterministic ~30% net benefit. (the offer being ~30% > than the market cap) So WHY shouldn't us the readers of the news, buy shares right now, before the market react ?
And we can even imagine a Web crawler software that detect that entreprise X announce to buy entreprise Y && the offer being > to the market cap, then auto buy ?
It's already too late to buy "before the market reacts". This is public information now, so it will be priced into the market price once the stock market opens.
Yes but my question would be, not everyone will buy at market opening T+1, but more some hours after ? Is This still impossible because of bots ? Tomorow empiricism will answer me.
Because there is nowhere(?) you can trade those shares right now, and if those places do exist, the local price almost certainly already reflects this news. Tomorrow morning, the new information will also influence the opening auction, and retail trades haven't a mission of catching any of the action
You might find on Monday the price tends upwards slightly for most of the day, which seems typical of this kind of news, but really, all the value of this deal is captured by existing shareholders -- who is going to sell you their shares at a cut price?
The market has already reacted. The bot strategy you describe is widely implemented. This is not an original idea.
Still the price stock hasn't gone uploads.disquscdn.com but this must be because we need to wait for tomorow opening. Are there any of thèses bots on github ? Why don't they work, are the market already fully saturated with those bots ?
The history of the “free economy” is one of concentration of market power. Good reference is Galbraith’s “1929 the great crash”
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322548 and marked it off-topic.
Discussing economics is off topic in a business merger? Its completely on topic. Economics is literally the study of scarce resource allocation. In the US, that’s everything from personal choice, business operations, through to global considerations.
To quote the dictionary “a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services”
It’s my understanding that HN is for technical discussions and business discussions. That’s exactly what my comment discussed. Further, that book by Galbraith is widely considered the gold standard for the Great Depression.
TLDR: if you want hacker news to be taken seriously as a place to discuss business and tech then my comment is appropriate in a merger discussion.
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I feel you're right, which is why I'm surprised by the seemingly negative response to this news, and the overwhelmingly positive response from GitHub+Microsoft.
Some of the same conflicts of interest exist in both modern cases, notwithstanding, both have opposite contribution histories.
Am I missing something?
I got the impression that nobody at all on HN was happy about the GitHub thing, FWIW.
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Others pointed out that the Github merger wasn’t all positive, but Microsoft is at least a software company.
IBM is a consulting company and their model is really different than RedHat.
Competing with AWS and Microsoft is pretty crazy and does not make sense to me. RedHat’s value is in its software, not its cloud delivery.
And, frankly, I depend a little more on centos/fedora than I do Github.
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I wouldn't call the GitHub+Microsoft acquisition response "overwhelmingly positive".
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Concentration of power isn’t always socially optimal. It’s probably never optimal.
There are periods of concentration and entrepreneurship. Part of the market maturity lifecycle. As a market gets more well established, competitors become less differentiated and start competing on cost which leads to consolidation. This creates openings for upstarts to disrupt or open new markets.
... and yet there is no shortage of examples of ownership being consistently more concentrated over time. Are we are right around the corner from seeing "upstarts" in the television, telecoms, and food manufacturing industries?
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I hope all companies using opensource software would contribute back either by returning some percent of their profits or in-terms of work-force.
Many companies take, but doesn't give back.
Oh, that's suuuuuper gross. Red Hat is pretty cool for open source but this can only mean one thing if IBM is going to suck blood from the stone.
Why are these things announced on Sunday? Microsoft acquiring Github was announced on Sunday too.
Maybe to prevent insider deals during stock hours eg. traders already in the know of upcoming acquisitions minutes before others?
First Github and now Redhat, is the world changing for the better or worse?
It Red hat and later canonical were bought by some companies.
This is going to be a big setback to open-source software as both compaines contribute a lot to Linux distroes.
Smaller companies will find it hard to rely or choose a distribution.
If IBM acquires Red hat, I hope they leave it alone.
The fun thing is that IBM stock was already recently dropping.
The CoC makes so much more sense now
Quick, get ride of RHEL
Oracle2.0.
Good news for fedora thou
What is your reasoning? In the other HN news thread, there were some people specifically worried about Fedora after the acquisition
RIP RedHat.
Big if true
>bloomberg.com
if true
Reuters is reporting the same
Now official - https://www.redhat.com/en
Well, I don't know anybody in the FOSS community which would be worried it systemd became endangered ;)
Please don't troll threads, intentionally or not, by throwing in classic flamebait. It seems funny at the time, and then we get another systemd or whatever flamewar.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322395 and marked it off-topic.
1. Every distro that already uses systemd (which is close to 100%)
2. (Close to 100% of) packagers and maintainers of system services
3. System administrators using distros from #1 (which is, again, practically everyone)
Now talking seriously, even if IBM stopped funding the project, it wouldn't be such a disaster. First of all, it's open source. A new mantainer could take over the project (for free) so the distributions can keep using it. But even if a replacement had to be found, the process wouldn't be traumatic... just like when Debian, the base of many other distributions, adopted systemd some years ago.
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The warnings for #1 were clear. Nobody wanted to hear or heed them. I have little sympathy for those that adopted it despite many people begging them (distro maintainers) not to.
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So you'd rather go back to Upstart or SysV? Really?
I would stay away from upstart because canonical. SysV, yes in the blink of an eye.
But you are mistaken if you think systemd is about init, it has gobbled so much stuff that this thing is a monstrous kitchen sink on its way to engulfing the whole bathroom.
then again maybe there are other init systems options than those two, devuan which arose from keeping systemd out of debian offert no less than 6 alternatives that address SysV flaws: openrc, sinit, runit, s6 and shepherd.
A: I'm not that fond of Ford cars.
B: So you want to drive a horse-and-buggy then?
That is to say, there are quite a number of modern inits that are not systemd. It's such a straw-man argument to bring up sysv init every time someone says something critical of systemd.
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Yes, without question. Systemd provides me absolutely no benefit when running a server and adds considerable complexity and fragility in a critical component.
A traditional SysV init is just fine. Want orchestrated service invocation on startup? Run it from SysV init instead of replacing SysV init.
There is no need to conflate the "sysv rc system" with "sysv init." They are entirely separate things.
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I'd rathe someone take another shot at service management.
I don't want to hold onto everything about SysV style systems - I love SMF in Solaris! - but I'd definitely prefer a leaner and more focused approach to development than we see with systemd.
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No, it was just a joke, you know... but in fact I've checked and I'm already running upstart right now, as part of my Ubuntu LTS system. So really no need to "go back" :P
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False dichotomy. There are more options than those. SystemD won because it had been adopted already and was supported by a major company in FOSS
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I switched to Gentoo because of systemd. I switched to OpenBSD because Linus was recently 'compromised' and adopted the CoC (worse: it's the highly political Creator's Covenant version). Theo's philosophy is shut up and hack, much like the early Linus with the bonus of being security instead of performance oriented.
I'd love to see a Portage Prefix on OpenBSD, or Gentoo/kOpenBSD, effort start up again. Bringing Portage to OpenBSD (even if prefixed) would make a wonderful combination!
I'm in the FOSS community and I like systemd, so find some other dead horse to beat.
That made my day... Thank you :)
Haven't laughed as hard in a while.
redhat had a lot of love in the world. any other vendor that shoved systemd down everyones throat would have been villified. redhat was given a pass. (karma, anyone?)
Karma? Red Hat shareholders will be getting a 60% premium over the current value.. if it's karma, then pushing systemd was a good action.
Indeed. Canonical tried and failed, hard.
You win! Truth
I know. It is perfectly OK. I will bever be a fan of systemd.
This is just as well, as I'm moving quite a bit to Net and OpenBSD. I'm tired of the Linux drama (systemd, CoC, balkanised standards, etc.) the broken stuff between distros. The slower changes for BSD development typically means more stable software. And ZFS. Plus, I actually prefer the ICS/BSD license for software in general, as it's maximally free. I've found over the years, that my BSD boxes are far and away more stable than their Linux counterparts. I do devops mostly, so stability and long-term availability are key factors. ext4 is getting long in the tooth and btrfs is nowhere near ZFS in stability or ability or I/O. I've never had a BSD system crash unexpectedly other than bad HW. I cannot say the same for Linux, even RHEL. I feel like a kid again in many ways, because I get to explore all the cool things the BSDs can do again. I'm even moving my Raspberry Pi over to NetBSD in the coming days as a prototype platform to explore BSD embedded possibilities.
I've gotten into the habit of replying to hidden and/or censored comments on HN :)
Would be sweet to see some competition by BSDs on mobile. Like an OpenBSD-Android. I guess that would take forever to get up to speed at this point, though... Hopefully manufacturers like OnePlus donate to the CopperHeadOS project so their hardware gets supported!