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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#211
post #86
post #59

IBM has been very open source friendly over the last 20 years, more so as of recently.

Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.

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

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#212
post #151

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…

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.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#213

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!)

Red Hat has a significant remote workforce. IBM famously fired theirs. Can we expect IBM to do the same to Red Hat's?

Yes. It will take some time but I'd take an exit package and find a new job.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#214

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?…

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?

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.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#216
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.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> People who've already established lives in places like Raleigh may not find a comparable job so easily.

Gonna have to disagree here. Raleigh is not a tech backwater. There’s plenty of comparable work to be found in the area.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#218
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

as fully remote Didn’t IBM have a massive crackdown on remote working recently? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/09/ibm_workfromhome_cu...

[deleted]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#219

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 t…

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...

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#220

Well, I don't know anybody in the FOSS community which would be worried it systemd became endangered ;)

So you'd rather go back to Upstart or SysV? Really?

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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