Welp, there goes any chance Research Triangle Park ever had of being a major tech hub.
IBM acquires Red Hat
51–60 of 1001 posts
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#52Guys, 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.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#53Is 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.
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.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#54If 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.
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?
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Red Hat is a lot more than the distros, isn't it?
Working for a competing company (Pivotal), I can say that yes, Red Hat does more than RHEL.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#56RIP 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
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#57If 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.
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?
use the IBM sales org, with the RH leadership ;-)
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#58Hoping 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!)
"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.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#59IBM has been very open source friendly over the last 20 years, more so as of recently.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#60I 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?
KDE's memory footprint on boot decreased to 400MB or less.