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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#401
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.

All software companies do this. They use patents like cold ware nukes: if you sue us over your patents, we'll sue over ours, and nobody wins.

This is simply the inevitable result of western IP law.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#402
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alienate and destroy part is likely. Very different situations otherwise. Sun was essentially a dead shell that still held a few valuable pieces when Oracle purchased them. Overall the business was in terminal decline. Red Hat, while wildly overvalued (as many things are/were in this bubble market), has a consistently growing business that is on good footing overall. Their prior four fiscal year sales figures: $1…

There is also the big difference that Sun was in the middle of transitioning to open source company (almost begrudgingly I think after everything else had failed), they weren't the great friend of open source they now are remembered as at their peak of their success. Sun still held significant amount of proprietary IP when they were acquired. In comparison RH has been open source from the get go, and pretty much ever…

Sun was helping open source before Linux existed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunsite

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#403
post #235

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?…

This announcement made me really sad. Red Hat was a company I admired. I guess the only silver lining is that the buyer wasn't Oracle.

Obligatory link to one of the best rants ever presented against Oracle as an acquirer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m

"Do not fall into the trap... of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison... If you put your hand inside a lawnmower, it will get chopped off. The lawnmower doesn't care... The lawnmower doesn't want to kill open source. The lawnmower just can't think about open source. The lawnmower can't have empathy."

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#404

This is a massive cash expenditure. IBM's biggest bet to be back into the cloud game. Given the amount of cash involved this might be IBM's last card, at least from an M&A perspective, so this deal needs to work. RedHat is much smaller than IBM, however far better managed with a clear product roadmap, lean sales and customer support. In a good scenario a reverse takeover will take place and RedHat management will tak…

There are strong rumors that IBM will be selling/spinning off its services group so perhaps that’s the funding justification?

If this kind of a split were happening it would be more accurate to describe it as the services group spinning off its product department.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#405
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

False dichotomy indeed. Right now I'm testing runit (on void linux) for my production machines. My experience since more than a year: Once it runs it runs, literally zero surprises so far.

The general volatility of systemd introduces so many unstable elements in your system, that it really makes you think if the added risk it is really worth the value it offers (even though I'm still not quiet sure what the value of systemd actually is).

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#408
post #391

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!)

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.

Depends on the company, but this is the status quo in most. Some startups (including ours) now offer 10 years exercise period, but it's not common.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#409
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)

If IBM ever takes etcd in a direction that k8s does not like, the k8s fork of etcd will be the one that's relevant going forward.
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