241–250 of 1001 posts
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?…
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?
Kidding aside, nothing about this is good for the open source movement.
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.
Well, I don't know anybody in the FOSS community which would be worried it systemd became endangered ;)
Haven't laughed as hard in a while.
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 t…
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-…
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.
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.
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.
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.