IBM acquires Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#311

Post by icebraining » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:27 PM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #310

cosinetau wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you're right, which is why I'm surprised by the seemingly negative response to this news, and the overwhelmingly positive response from GitHub+Microsoft. Some of the same conflicts of interest exist in both modern cases, notwithstanding, both have opposite contribution histories. Am I missing something?

I wouldn't call the GitHub+Microsoft acquisition response "overwhelmingly positive".

I agree, plenty of criticism and skepticism here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#312

Post by alsadi » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:27 PM UTC

Many comments mistaken redhat as an OS company? They are not. IBM did not buy redhat to get RHEL.

They bought it for the hybrid cloud as clearly stated.

Redhat has openstack platform, cloud formation/manage iq, openshift, ansible, ceph, glusterfs, codeenvy (behind eclipse che),... Etc

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#313

Post by gred » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:27 PM UTC

I haven't felt this way since March 25th, 2014.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#314

Post by aphextron » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:27 PM UTC

Does this have regulatory approval already?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#315

Post by shaklee3 » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:28 PM UTC

filereaper wrote: post #130

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-…

I've followed POWER for a while now, and it seems to be mostly marketing hype. The POWER8 was not much better than the Xeons out, and had almost no availability. POWER9 excels at a lot of IO-bound tasks, but again, it's nearly impossible to find. It doesn't help that there are very few systems you can buy out there. On paper, the POWER9 looks awesome. Then you look closer at the actual architecture and realize that a lot of pieces of the design are weird and/or seem somewhat useless. It also doesn't help that they're extremely expensive, especially since there are so few options.

So while I'd like IBM to compete with Intel, they need to pony up more money if they really want to push the industry. Don't make it so hard to buy one, and publish benchmarks/comparisons with Intel.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#316

Post by janc_ » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:28 PM UTC

jarym wrote: post #54

mrkstu wrote: post #42

If 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?

Oracle sales means promising everything and delivering half of that at best. Are you sure you want to use that as an example?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#317

Post by throwaway2048 » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:29 PM UTC

zie wrote: post #173

rodgerd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.

To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it. RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn't necessarily open, and it's not yet really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)

Their open power initiative is really no more "open source" than say Intel's processors, with the possible exception of Management Engine shenanigans from Intel.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#318

Post by cyphar » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:29 PM UTC

beatgammit wrote: post #207

solatic wrote: post #153

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?…

As soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year. What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?

SUSE has been acquired many times in the past several years (Novell, Attachmate, MicroFocus). In theory, EQT will help us "get back on our feet" in terms of self-sufficiency but how things will actually pan out is obviously still unclear.

[Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#319

Post by kazen44 » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:29 PM UTC

csours wrote: post #96

greglindahl wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last startup, blekko, was acquired by IBM in 2015. They treated our people well; many of them still work there. It takes 6 months to be acquired by IBM, so I don't think recent stock market gyrations have anything to do with it.

My perception is that IBM (and HP, Oracle, etc) will buy a product company, and then IBM-ify it, and then just sit on that product for years with minimal improvements. That is my fear for Red Hat. Successful product companies are hungry - IBM is not.

Also, this might be just IBM buying out its competition.. like oracle and all the others do most of the time.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#320

Post by josteink » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:30 PM UTC

devoply wrote: post #174

solatic wrote: post #153

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?…

Yeah, 10 years down the line RHEL is pretty much guaranteed dead. Probably say goodbye to Fedora as well.

But Red Hat/Fedora has been a huge contributor to very basic Linux ecosystem things which everyone benefits from, like the freedesktop standard stuff and more.

I wonder how this change will pan out across the entire Linux-sphere. I’m wondering and I’m trying not to be pessimistic.