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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#21

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.

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.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#22
post #7

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?

I'd place my bets that MS would buy Canonical since they already have a relationship.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#24
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?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#27
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.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#28
post #9

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.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#29
post #13
post #7

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?

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.
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