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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#391

Post by puzzle »

Reason077 wrote: post #307
kache_ wrote: 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!)

You usually can't hold on to options for longer than three months after you leave a company, right? You'd have had to exercise them.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#392

Post by prepend »

cosinetau wrote: post #288
ianai wrote: post #231

The history of the “free economy” is one of concentration of market power. Good reference is Galbraith’s “1929 the great crash”

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?

Others pointed out that the Github merger wasn’t all positive, but Microsoft is at least a software company.

IBM is a consulting company and their model is really different than RedHat.

Competing with AWS and Microsoft is pretty crazy and does not make sense to me. RedHat’s value is in its software, not its cloud delivery.

And, frankly, I depend a little more on centos/fedora than I do Github.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#393

Post by SubiculumCode »

Aloha wrote: post #59

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

"IBM further says, "Upon closing of the acquisition, Red Hat will join IBM's Hybrid Cloud team as a distinct unit, preserving the independence and neutrality of Red Hat's open source development heritage and commitment, current product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, and unique development culture. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat's current management team. Jim Whitehurst also will join IBM's senior management team and report to Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat's headquarters, facilities, brands and practices.""

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#394

Post by SwellJoe »

ethbro wrote: post #234

IBM the company is like an iceberg. The R&D and open source contributions are the tip. And the other 90% is services revenue. And most people's experience with IBM services isn't positive.

IBM is, as far a I can tell, the best example of a "mixed bag" in tech. I have heard both great and terrible things about IBM from customers, employees, developers on Open Source projects, etc. They are a huge organization, and one that seems more divided than many.

It may be more useful to view IBM as a collection of fiefdoms rather than a single, focused, entity. Yes, the money all goes into one pot at the end of the day, but there's large variance across organizations within IBM.

That said, from what I can tell OSS that goes into the IBM machine doesn't usually come out the other side improved. I worry for the health of CentOS/RHEL/Fedora under IBM's leadership. My desktop and server OS of choice, with a few brief forays into other territories along the way, has been from Red Hat for 23 years. I'd hate to lose Fedora or CentOS, or see them stagnate. Red Hat has been among the most steadfast in their support of Open Source software, as well...so, there's a real risk of the kernel, Gnome, and other OSS core infrastructure suffering, because Red Hat is a major contributor to those projects.

I don't think it'll be sudden. It usually takes years for projects to become clearly worse for having come under IBM's purview. Red Hat is large itself, and will probably take years to be fully assimilated and homogenized into IBM's lukewarm culture of mere competence with regard to their Open Source contributions.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#395

Post by gregcoombe »

NovaX wrote: post #368
Reason077 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”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 pate…

It's been my experience that engineers are quite poor at judging the "patentability" of ideas. I'm not saying that you're wrong, just that the patent field is quite opaque and difficult to understand, which is why patent lawyers do quite well.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#396

Post by manigandham »

raesene9 wrote: post #292
bb88 wrote: post #243

Having been a linux user for 20 years now, I'm not worried. Mostly because in the OS market there is enough competition that didn't exist back in the 1990's when RedHat was founded around the Linux kernel. And we continue to have valid choices in the Linux market. And as we move forward into Kubernetes, we're looking at lightweight OS's to host a single purpose microservice. Most companies don't really need the full…

ofc you realise that one of the major contributors to the Kubernetes ecosystem is Redhat. So IBM now control key elements of k8s setups like etcd (a CoreOS project, ergo a Redhat Project, ergo an IBM project)

At the same time, K8S team has been rapidly standardizing everything and turning it into a very modular system. etcd is pretty much a "done" project, but if it ever goes bad, it can easily be replaced.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#397

Post by colordrops »

jordigh wrote: post #387

I grieve the most that this will really weaken the argument for commercial free software. We could always say, look at Red Hat, they don't sell a drop of non-free software. It's possible to be free and commercial! I doubt Red Hat will continue to operate this way, especially if they are receiving money from IBM's other ventures. I hope there's room for another Red Hat in this world.

Red Hat used to sell non-free software using the freemium model with Redhat Enterprise. Is that no longer the case?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#398

Post by TylerJewell »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #365
sz4kerto wrote: post #52

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.

WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#399

Post by pnutjam »

cmurf wrote: post #304
bloopernova wrote: post #187

Earlier 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?

The boilerplate and vague statement of Red Hat remaining a distinct unit doesn't really tell us anything. More relevant is what the CentOS and Fedora communities think of this acquisition, because no matter what they are community driven projects. There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out. I'm curious what openSU…

OpenSuse still rocks it.
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