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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#431
HELP, I have a big question : The buyout will go to the shareholders, that is a deterministic ~30% net benefit. (the offer being ~30% > than the market cap) So WHY shouldn't us the readers of the news, buy shares right now, before the market react ?

And we can even imagine a Web crawler software that detect that entreprise X announce to buy entreprise Y && the offer being > to the market cap, then auto buy ?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#433

There cannot be a single Red Hat employee outside of RH's board of directors that thinks this would be a good move for Red Hat.

As a Red Hat employee (opinions my own, not Red Hat's, etc) and though not involved in any discussions like this, I can see some potential for it being a good move. There's a lot of work being done to a) move things from mainframe to distributed and b) help people squeeze the last bits of utility out of their mainframes. That requires knowledge on both sides of the house. The world is going to open-source distributed…

It's also worth pointing out that Red Hat (and Big Banks) have been desperately trying to train new mainframe operators with limited success due to the shift to distributed, to the extent that they've even been giving money to select colleges specifically to develop mainframe-centric curriculum.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#434
post #325

Cloud native/kubernetes race is just exploding. RH strategy was mostly focused around OpenShift lately, which makes complete sense. Kubernetes is the next datacenter OS, just as ESX (and virtualization in general) was in the past 15 years and it's going to drive a radical shift in the enterprise IT world in the coming years. IBM (as an active member of the kubernetes community) see that huge opportunity and are doubl…

Docker just took more funding, so it'll likely be a while, but yeah I'd say they're very likely to get acquired in the medium - long term.

Rancher haven't raised in a couple of years, so might be more prone to acquisition in the short term.

In general it lseems likely that as containerization has taken off over the last couple of years , larger players who missed the boat will be looking to make acquisitions to become more relevant in that space.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#435
I don't really understand how IBM keeps rolling along, as they outsource more and more of their workers and kill off entire divisions of their best-known products. They don't really make software anymore, they don't really make hardware. Their cloud offerings are an also-ran behind Oracle. They have a massively overhyped, marketing-driven AI division. Mostly they seem to do the awful kind of IT consulting that the other H1B sweatshops engage in, but perhaps at a slightly more prestigious level.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, but most cloud providers are not opensourcing their contributions to linux.

Is that really true? The big three cloud providers all have commits to the Linux kernel: ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=amazon --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an ' --date=short | grep @amazon | wc -l 206 ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=microsoft --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an ' --date=short | grep @microsoft | wc -l 1825 ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=google --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an ' --date=short | g…

Good on Google.

Besides the kernel contributions, Google has a long list of open source projects: https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured

For all the hates Google gets on HN, they have been at the forefront of supporting OSS.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Now talking seriously, even if IBM stopped funding the project, it wouldn't be such a disaster. First of all, it's open source. A new mantainer could take over the project (for free) so the distributions can keep using it. But even if a replacement had to be found, the process wouldn't be traumatic... just like when Debian, the base of many other distributions, adopted systemd some years ago.

A new maintainer could take over the project, but Red Hat was funding their labor, and the chances that someone takes over the project and continues contributing regularly goes up significantly if their labor is reliably funded. (Working for a large company is not the only way to fund labor, but it seems to be the most common one in our society.)

Similarly, having something worth switching to also depends on labor to develop such an alternative. Upstart is no longer funded, and was the closest (including in terms of mindshare that caused people to spend labor developing integration between their software and the init system).

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#438

HELP, I have a big question : The buyout will go to the shareholders, that is a deterministic ~30% net benefit. (the offer being ~30% > than the market cap) So WHY shouldn't us the readers of the news, buy shares right now, before the market react ? And we can even imagine a Web crawler software that detect that entreprise X announce to buy entreprise Y && the offer being > to the market cap, then auto buy ?

The market has already reacted. The bot strategy you describe is widely implemented. This is not an original idea.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#439

HELP, I have a big question : The buyout will go to the shareholders, that is a deterministic ~30% net benefit. (the offer being ~30% > than the market cap) So WHY shouldn't us the readers of the news, buy shares right now, before the market react ? And we can even imagine a Web crawler software that detect that entreprise X announce to buy entreprise Y && the offer being > to the market cap, then auto buy ?

Because there is nowhere(?) you can trade those shares right now, and if those places do exist, the local price almost certainly already reflects this news. Tomorrow morning, the new information will also influence the opening auction, and retail trades haven't a mission of catching any of the action

You might find on Monday the price tends upwards slightly for most of the day, which seems typical of this kind of news, but really, all the value of this deal is captured by existing shareholders -- who is going to sell you their shares at a cut price?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#440
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do not think that there were any clear warnings that you should avoid using systemd because it's good software that might stop being developed soon.

I also don't think avoiding using systemd solves the problem. My preferred alternative to an abandoned systemd is a well-developed systemd, not sysvinit.

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