The history of the “free economy” is one of concentration of market power. Good reference is Galbraith’s “1929 the great crash”
IBM acquires Red Hat
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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SPSS comes to mind.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#233Actually 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…
"stupid sysadmin reasons" Yeah, who needs stability and consistency? It far more important to be able to jump upon the latest whizz, bang, wheeeeee!
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#234IBM 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.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#235It'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?…
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.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#236It'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?…
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.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Debian is solidly community based. Ubuntu depends on Debian in order to add its own value on top.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#238So, 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.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#239Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#240New 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.
All major tech companies file patents - shouldn't be surprising that it's going to be part of the job.