Live data from Hacker News

IBM acquires Red Hat

redhat.com

461–470 of 1001 posts

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#461
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.

I don't have any contacts with IBM business-wise, so my question might sound naive: Why 90% services revenue would be a problem? They have to fund these R&D and open source contributions somehow.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#462
What has just happened??

Was there some behind-the-door takeover, from a friend to a friend? Or a pressure from investors like MS with Nokia? It just doesn't make any other sense...

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#463

$50 says someone like Microsoft or Google responds to this by buying Canonical.

At this point, Microsoft might as well do its own Debian-based distro. What would they need from Canonical, really? Experienced people? I suspect it'd be much cheaper to pull a Hejlsberg with them.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#464

I really don't understand this. Redhat has been very profitable lately, what do they stand to gain from this? Why do they need cash so badly, what are they investing in? Their success is so dependent on having management that understands how unique their business model is, I just can't understand why they'd be so desperate for cash that they'd risk screwing that up. Even if you have confidence that it's going to be f…

They don't need the cash, they want the cash. What management and shareholders stand to gain from it is cashing out. That's the way business works. Not saying it's the way things should be, just the way they are.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#465
post #270
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.

Have you been enjoying the morale nothings-on-fire-we-swear propoganda all-hands meetings? I was in IBM, software dev, for a year - just left around July. God help your soul.

The joy of working in a large corp. One day it's: boss's boss cares a lot about the work of this team. The next day the whole project gets cancelled. All hands propaganda meetings are so much fun ;-)

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#466
can someone explain to me what will happen tomorow at market opening ? Currently redhat is quoted 114$, IBM announced they will buy all share at 190$. will it be tradable tomorow morning at market opening ?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#467

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.

Collabora?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#468
post #440
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>because it's good software that might stop being developed soon.

Having looked at the code. Calling it good software is a dubious proposition at best.

As mentioned in another comment. There are other init replacements that are seeking to solve the same issues as systemd. I bet you can’t name them though since they were never properly evaluated.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#469
post #277
post #151

Actually 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…

Totally agree. RHEL's support windows are FAR too long and result in more problems than they solve. Large businesses wait till the last minute to upgrade then realize that working through a minimum of 5 years (often 10) of changes is extremely hard. This means that you often run unsupported while everyone scrambles to fix all the changes introduced by the upgrade. Cannonical's 5 year support window is much more sensi…

For individuals and small businesses, sure it makes no sense. But large enterprise customers will pay a lot of money for support windows that are far too long. That's why Red Hat (and every other large company) offers them. Even when the publicly available support ends, they still often have hangers-on who will pay even more money to get a few more years support out of them.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#470
post #358

Will 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. [1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

I figured bringing up that Tumblr will get flagged or at least downvoted, but it is amusing to ponder what would be the biggest, most high-profile acquisition in tech to merit an entry. Doubly funny when the firms involved aren't Silicon Valley startups but old enterprises.
Post reply on HN