$50 says someone like Microsoft or Google responds to this by buying Canonical.
IBM acquires Red Hat
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you expand?
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#353IBM 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.
Are RedHat not a for profit enterprise required to appease investors? They're also a publicly traded company - and part of the S&P 500 even!
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#354So...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…
Expect business as usual for a year. Any changes will occur after then.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#355Earlier 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?
I'm sticking with Fedora - too early to tell.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#356It'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?…
> Red Hat shareholders just sold out. The Red Hat board were offered a massive premium on an already generously-priced stock. If they hadn't sold there probably would've been lawsuits left and right.
The deal is subject to shareholder approval. I think based on that approval, you'll be able to estimate how right or wrong you are about lawsuits had the board rejected the offer.
RHT is $20 billion in market cap as of Friday, and the offer is $34 billion.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Can you expand?
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#358Will this warrant an Our Incredible Journey [1] entry?
Not technically an exit, I guess, at least not for most of the staff that start to work for Big Blue in a month.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#359Actually 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…
What's the alternative? All of the places I've worked that used Red Hat never explicitly looked at the Red Hat support timeline. They looked at their business, the software they used, the features they needed, and based their upgrade cycles around that. They'd only upgrade the major versions of their primary software when a project would benefit and skipped major updates that were problematic. At my current job they'…
I suggest the latest Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS.
Debian stable keep the history of roughly 2 years release cycles. Ubuntu LTS is set to follow strict 2 years release cycle.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#360New 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.
How about SAP? Aren't they a European company where software patents have no legal force? Do they fill patents for the US too?