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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#361
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.

> Maybe, but IBM has been historically a for profit enterprise...

So has RedHat.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#362
post #316
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If they can still sell despite having that (very much deserved) reputation, then their sales teams must be pretty impressive.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#363
post #183

New 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.

> IBM is a pathological company, and definitely not good news for open source.

I guess, if you ignore the part where they're one of the biggest corporate contributors to the Linux kernel.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#364
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want Google or Amazon anywhere near Canonical.

Why?

I don't know about Google but Amazon should definitely not come near Canonical. Amazon is the worst among FAANG & Microsoft towards Open Source. Look at what they have given back to the community.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#365

Guys, this is not just, or mainly not RH Linux. :( - kernel development - Ansible - JBoss (I know HN hates Java, especially Java EE, but it was and is an important factor in enterprise OSS adoption) - OpenShift - Ceph, Gluster All these are in danger, not just RHEL. I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS. Canonical is way behind Red Hat in t…

I don't know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS.

Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they're not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#366

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

1. Every distro that already uses systemd (which is close to 100%) 2. (Close to 100% of) packagers and maintainers of system services 3. System administrators using distros from #1 (which is, again, practically everyone)

The warnings for #1 were clear. Nobody wanted to hear or heed them. I have little sympathy for those that adopted it despite many people begging them (distro maintainers) not to.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#367

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

So you'd rather go back to Upstart or SysV? Really?

False dichotomy. There are more options than those. SystemD won because it had been adopted already and was supported by a major company in FOSS

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#368
post #183

New 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.

”sat through a presentation on why I should file patents” Some years ago, I worked for Red Hat. I remember them saying the same thing about patents. There was even some kind of reward scheme if you filed one with your name on it. (in hindsight, I guess I should have held on to those employee stock options!)

I've seen RedHat (via JBoss) knowingly patent work they read in a research paper without referencing or funding them. I was positive it was for a reward, as there was no additionally novel ideas in their descriptions and similar work was already open sourced. I knew it wouldn't hold up so it didn't bother me as impacting my projects, but I was disappointed over the ethics of them doing that. I do wonder how many patent rewards are given for someone else's work by farming from the research community.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#369

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?…

> Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Goddamnit.

RedHat is a public company, in what fantasy land do you exist where this isn't expected?

Furthermore, the deal is still subject to shareholder approval:

> The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat. It is subject to Red Hat shareholder approval. It also is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the latter half of 2019.

So you really should be complaining that RedHat's board of directors just sold out, and that's their fiduciary duty.

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