IBM acquires Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#331

Post by lima » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

I admire Red Hat as a company for their principled and uncompromising stance on open source. I contribute to many Red Hat open source projects and even promote their products, because they share my values. Their success directly contributes to the open source ecosystem in many ways, and they have a history of doing the right thing (tm).

I'm not sure how I feel about doing the same thing for IBM.

This is either very good news, or very bad. If Red Hat can truly remain independent and preserve their culture and values, they can achieve a lot more with IBM's money, and hopefully change IBM for the better.

If the culture changes for the worse, it's the end. Many, many people work at Red Hat because of the culture, not the pay (which is average), not to mention community contributors. This is particularly true for their top-tier engineers.

Red Hat's leadership is acutely aware of this, so I'm optimistic.

I can only imagine the discussions going on on their internal mailing lists. Friends of mine who are RH employees have fun stories to tell about epic discussions about much more inconsequential decisions :-)

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#332

Post by inscrutable » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

I can see independent software vendors like Heptio and Canonical being the main beneficiary of this deal.

IBM can sweat the old large companies but they have no credible cloud offering and this doesn't change that. Converting on-prem to kubernetes and using a proper cloud like Google, AWS or Microsoft without also paying steep margin to IBM would seem to be more attractive.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#333

Post by kazen44 » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

mxuribe wrote: post #298

So...how does this - if at all - impact linux (running smoothly) on thinkpads? From what i hear, beyond the normal open source contributors, numerous redhat engineers contribute towards fundamental device drivers for the thinpad platform of laptops...which, as i undestand it, why linux distros run soooo smoothly on for example my thinkpad t420. Perhaps my thought is selfish, but i love me some thinkpads - specificall…

only time will tell i guess.

Thinkpads are still nice machines to run not only linux on, but also openBSD. (most, if not all openBSD dev's run thinkpads as their development machines).

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#334

Post by pnutjam » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:35 PM UTC

bloopernova wrote: post #187

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?…

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?

Not a huge fan of Redhat, but I am a big user. I'm willing to wait and see.

Maybe we'll see more community offerings?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#335

Post by rwmj » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:37 PM UTC

mxuribe wrote: post #298

So...how does this - if at all - impact linux (running smoothly) on thinkpads? From what i hear, beyond the normal open source contributors, numerous redhat engineers contribute towards fundamental device drivers for the thinpad platform of laptops...which, as i undestand it, why linux distros run soooo smoothly on for example my thinkpad t420. Perhaps my thought is selfish, but i love me some thinkpads - specificall…

The Thinkpad brand has been owned by Lenovo since around 2006.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#336

Post by kazen44 » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:38 PM UTC

55555 wrote: post #273

Can 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 t…

nobody got fired for buying IBM/Oracle/SAP.

usually, IBM is used for very large enterprise projects and it is usually done at a "high level". (aka, architecture et al, not direct implementation).

IBM is a slow, corporate monster, but it is very good at doing high, exec level consulting.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#337

Post by CamperBob2 » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:38 PM UTC

trebligdivad wrote: post #266

Aloha wrote: post #59

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

The problem (as an ex-IBMer) is that that friendlyness is only in parts of the company; much of IBM is open-source hostile.

As a result of this news, though, wouldn't you be inclined to suspect that the hostile faction just took a massive blow?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#338

Post by sabana » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:39 PM UTC

cenal wrote: post #201

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-…

Microsoft has been doing a lot to rebuild itself as a cloud provider. IBM has been doing a lot to go out of business. Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines. IBM is a floating raft of failed leadership. Microsoft isn't trusted fully by the community but they are making inroads under their new CEO. IBM has been firing its most senior people in an effort to slow its…

"Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines." this is not true? maybe you meant he's a technical adviser

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#339

Post by icebraining » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:39 PM UTC

bdavis__ wrote: post #199

severino wrote: post #161

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

redhat had a lot of love in the world. any other vendor that shoved systemd down everyones throat would have been villified. redhat was given a pass. (karma, anyone?)

Karma? Red Hat shareholders will be getting a 60% premium over the current value.. if it's karma, then pushing systemd was a good action.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#340

Post by onetimemanytime » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 8:40 PM UTC

kartan wrote: post #170

IBM has been historically a Linux contributor. Eclipse, their open source IDE, opened the other to Java and other programming languages in the OS. And Power processors supported Linux early on. From that perspective to purchase Red Hat makes sense. It makes even more sense as the announcement states that they are trying to create a bigger cloud provider to compete with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft…

>>IBM has been historically a Linux contributor.

Maybe, but IBM has been historically a for profit enterprise, required to appease investors every quarter (or the CEO goes, stock crashes etc.)

They may have contributed to projects to then sell services, but make no mistake, IBM has their own interests at heart, not yours.