IBM have a consistent, decades long history of acquiring superb firms and then mismanaging them into marketplace irrelevance.
IBM acquires Red Hat
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#272Red Hat has contributed so much to open source projects. Even if you don't use their distribution, their contributions are present in countless initiatives and projects.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#273Can someone help me understand... What exactly do IBM and Oracle do? I assume they are mostly hired to build software and do software/hardware/networking/database services. How much of their business is government contracts? Everyone here is talking about how nobody enjoys hiring them but they are billion-dollar companies... I have never worked in the public sector nor at a conglomerate so I am unable to comprehend this.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#274Earlier 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.
Rational Rose, Lotus
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#275Is this event comparable to when Oracle bought Sun? Should we expect IBM to rip RH apart and alienate all existing customers?
The alienate and destroy part is likely. Very different situations otherwise. Sun was essentially a dead shell that still held a few valuable pieces when Oracle purchased them. Overall the business was in terminal decline. Red Hat, while wildly overvalued (as many things are/were in this bubble market), has a consistently growing business that is on good footing overall. Their prior four fiscal year sales figures: $1…
There is also the big difference that Sun was in the middle of transitioning to open source company (almost begrudgingly I think after everything else had failed), they weren't the great friend of open source they now are remembered as at their peak of their success. Sun still held significant amount of proprietary IP when they were acquired. In comparison RH has been open source from the get go, and pretty much everything they have is open source.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#276"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they buy you."
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#277Actually 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…
Totally agree. RHEL's support windows are FAR too long and result in more problems than they solve. Large businesses wait till the last minute to upgrade then realize that working through a minimum of 5 years (often 10) of changes is extremely hard. This means that you often run unsupported while everyone scrambles to fix all the changes introduced by the upgrade. Cannonical's 5 year support window is much more sensible.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So you're saying to just use SysV init to launch processes from inittab, and have one of those processes be a systemd/launchd clone that launches everything else. I mean, I guess that's a possible design, but at that point I would question whether using the SysV init program is really buying you anything.
In any case, most people wouldn't consider that design "SysV init". The SysV init ecosystem is built around rc files.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#279God help us. Will there be any independent open source/open source friendly company that isn't controlled by some corporate giant?
The BSDs are all open source and not tied to anyone. Since operating systems are literally key components of being free, this truly matters. Red Hat had too much of a grip on Linux (kernel), the userland and much more. systemd, while an atrocity on its own, has now become a requirement for certain userland software projects, which is heresy. So much for the tenet of a software program doing one thing well.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try to use something made by IBM and then tell us if you like it.
I'm of two minds to this. I have a personal POWER6 running AIX and it handles my main hosting and mail. It's a great box and I love the hardware, but the IBM salesdroids would never talk to me (I do all my business through a VAR), and the CUoD nonsense and having to use a whole separate HMC to manage the single LPAR is obnoxious. On the other hand, I absolutely love my Talos II. It's not an IBM machine, but it's engi…
TLAs I identify:
- AIX
- IBM
- R&D
- POWER*
- VAR
- CUoD
- HMC
- LPAR
- OpenPOWER