481–490 of 1001 posts
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…
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Public companies can have multiple classes of stock with different voting rights. Private company can be sold.
Sure they can, but most public companies (absent places like Facebook, which IIRC has a setup which favours Zuckerberg heavily) are more susceptible to being forced to sell whether they want to or not. Private companies (especially one's who aren't beholden to VCs or similar) have the option to say no, regardless of how much money they're offered.
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So you'd rather go back to Upstart or SysV? Really?
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
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 j…
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This is sad, Fedora has been my favourite distribution for a little while. Red Hat have been a good community player and it is a big loss for them to be gobbled up by IBM. What is the best alternative to Fedora and CentOS?
The obvious alternative would be Ubuntu. The LTS releases are alternatives to RHEL/CentOS. The others are Fedora alternatives. However, Red Hat is _far_ more than RHEL. They actually build a ton of OSS that's used in RHEL and elsewhere. Ubuntu does little more than repackage Debian. That's not a criticism. They package well, and they know how to polish. But there's no replacement for Red Hat as a company.
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https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-r... "- IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community - Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team"
Do truth-in-advertising laws apply if IBM were to change course from a stated goal?
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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?
I got the impression that nobody at all on HN was happy about the GitHub thing, FWIW.
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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…
The same should happen with the init system. Of course, it's different when the software pretends not just to be an init system but also a replacement for tons of other daemons like cron, inetd, networking, etc, making it a huge piece of software. But maybe that's the problem in the first place.
IBM has been historically a Linux contributor. Eclipse, their open source IDE, opened the other to Java and other programming languages in the OS. And Power processors supported Linux early on. From that perspective to purchase Red Hat makes sense. It makes even more sense as the announcement states that they are trying to create a bigger cloud provider to compete with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft…
>> IBM has been historically a Linux contributor. Maybe, but IBM has been historically a for profit enterprise, required to appease investors every quarter (or the CEO goes, stock crashes etc.) They may have contributed to projects to then sell services, but make no mistake, IBM has their own interests at heart, not yours.
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>> IBM has been historically a Linux contributor. Maybe, but IBM has been historically a for profit enterprise, required to appease investors every quarter (or the CEO goes, stock crashes etc.) They may have contributed to projects to then sell services, but make no mistake, IBM has their own interests at heart, not yours.
You do realise that a lot of Linux kernel development is being done by for profit enterprises, don't you? None of these companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they have a vested interest. Linux is at the heart of possibly the majority of modern IT infrastructure. Besides,IBM/RH are by not even the largest contributors. Intel does more than both of them combined, and then you have ot…