Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM acquires Red Hat

redhat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 1001 posts

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#471

Post by ezoe »

lotsofcows wrote: post #233
ezoe wrote: 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…

"stupid sysadmin reasons" Yeah, who needs stability and consistency? It far more important to be able to jump upon the latest whizz, bang, wheeeeee!

By using the obsolete software versions, it cause instability and inconsistency and a lot of effort will be wasted to workaround the issue rather than solving the real problem.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#472

Post by ta4577547554745 »

djsumdog wrote: post #382
jlg23 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people's experience with IBM isn't positive. That does not reflect my or my friends experience. Once one gets beyond the local representatives, service for me always was exceptional.

Maybe for hardware. There are pretty good about hardware support. At two companies I worked at we got people sent to us for on-site repair. Their software support is something else. I haven't had to use IBM tooling in a while, but back when I did, everything they sold was absolutely fucking terrible (DB2, RAD, WebSphere, Clear Case, Tivoli) compared to many open source equivalents. The only reason people buy this rub…

> Their software support is something else. I haven't had to use IBM tooling in a while, but back when I did, everything they sold was absolutely fucking terrible (DB2, RAD, WebSphere, Clear Case, Tivoli) compared to many open source equivalents.

Over 20 years in contracting that's been my experience too, utterly lazy, awful software - awful UI, continuous license issues, buggy, juggernauts of bloat. WSAD (Eclipse + Websphere plugins) was easily my worst experience with an IDE, ClearCase easily my worst experience with a SCCS etc. I pity people that have to work with any of it 9-5.

The banks and insurance companies I've worked at had support contracts, but they were useless - you more often than not just had to suck it up.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#473

Post by bubblethink »

bloopernova wrote: post #187
solatic wrote: post #153

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?…

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?

>Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?

I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere. Not because of this anyway. There were similar concerns around RH's acquisition (if that's what you call it) of CentOS a couple of years ago, but things have largely been the same. And it's mostly for selfish reasons. The overall dev mindshare of RH based systems has shrunk compared to Ubuntu. So anything that moves people away from Ubuntu to the RH ecosystem is net win because eventually some corp will write a check when they need support. It's the same idea as MS not going after pirates just to increase MS's overall market share.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#474

Post by agumonkey »

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.

It's been quite clear that their IT service shift was sad. The rest is still pretty pretty.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#475

Post by gigatexal »

joebolte wrote: post #246
gigatexal wrote: post #200

Here's my take since we're all weighing in and are all in different levels of shock: IBM needs Redhat to stay relevant. The way I think about it is in a few ways. 1) IBM's stock price has been tanking because I think they're not investing in new products but just cutting expenditures to meet stupid Wall-Street targets. But with the introduction of RedHat they get new "blood" as it were. Who knows, what if they make t…

What do you mean “a la Satya Nadella and Microsoft”? He didn’t join MSFT through an acquisition. Did you mean Jobs/NeXT/Apple?

The analogy isn’t 1:1 but I think the core of MS and what he was doing in the cloud division might as well had him an outsider. MS was still highly Windows first all others second under Ballmer. Under Nadella he bet the future of the company on cloud and it’s been the right choice. What if they do the same with a changing of the guard — not immediately but eventually?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#476

Post by zapita »

This was to be expected. Red Hat had no future as an independent company. Their flagship product RHEL still dominates their revenue 20 years later... But they have already saturated the enterprise Linux server market, and that market is in decline. All attempts to diversify have failed. Openshift and Ansible have potential, but compared to the decline of their core business, it’s too little too late. The current CEO is a peacetime CEO: he managed a successful business competently in fair wheather, but is not fit to navigate the rough seas ahead. This allows him to leave on a victory (“the largest software acquisition ever!”) and go on a book tour or something. Meanwhile IBM can delude themselves a few more years until they’ve finished milking Red Hat’s products for easy growth. Then they will have to face the reality of their situation: they have no real answer to Big Cloud eating their lunch. For now, though, they can pretend this is it.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#477

Post by siddboots »

tootie wrote: post #449
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”

There are periods of concentration and entrepreneurship. Part of the market maturity lifecycle. As a market gets more well established, competitors become less differentiated and start competing on cost which leads to consolidation. This creates openings for upstarts to disrupt or open new markets.

... and yet there is no shortage of examples of ownership being consistently more concentrated over time. Are we are right around the corner from seeing "upstarts" in the television, telecoms, and food manufacturing industries?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#478

Post by sytse »

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.

IBMs revenue comes from consulting but a lot of their profit comes from software https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-split-between-IT-and-consu...

In their latest quarter https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-3Q18-Earnings-Chart... $4.1b of revenue came from Cognitive Solutions (mostly solutions software) at a 76% gross profit while their global business services with the same revenue had a gross profit of only 29.8%.

By the way, they spend $1.3b on RD&E while their net income is $2.7b.

I previously commented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772 with a bit more context on how I view this deal.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#479

Post by jonquark »

c3d wrote: post #347
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #31

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.

I have some hopes that Red Hat has a strong-enough future value for IBM that we end up redefining IBM rather than the other way round. There are precedents, notably the Apple/NeXT merger. Today's Apple is 95% NeXT and 5% old Apple. Can this happen here? Time will tell.

An an IBM employee, I definitely hope that some of the RH culture rubs off on us, but I also hope that RH retains its own distinctive identity and isn't altered very much by the deal aside from having access to IBM's resources such as the scale of the sales organisation.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#480

Post by severino »

Chyzwar wrote: post #452
severino wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was just a joke, you know... but in fact I've checked and I'm already running upstart right now, as part of my Ubuntu LTS system. So really no need to "go back" :P

Ubuntu switched to systemd from 16.04. You must be running 14.04. Ubuntu improved a lot in 4 years.

Yes, it's 14.04. I tried 18.04 a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't really like the new GNOME interface. For me, Unity was (is) a great DE. I know other things improved too, but I'm not really enthusiastic about them either. For example, snaps, whose paradigm of self-contained applications I don't consider an improvement.
Post reply on HN