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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#501

Post by chx »

all_blue_chucks wrote: post #401
kache_ wrote: 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.

Except IBM is really infamous for using and abusing theirs. Check the Sun story recited in https://www.wired.com/2012/11/the-patent-system-works-fine-b...

> "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#502

Post by TylerJewell »

kartan wrote: post #170

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…

I am CEO of WSO2, an open source software company, with 500 enterprise customers and competitive to IBM, MULE, and RHT.

I have packaged up my observations on the acquisition and the impact to open source in this blog post.

https://medium.com/@tylerjewell/ibm-acquires-red-hat-what-th...

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#503

Post by [deleted] »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #337
trebligdivad wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem (as an ex-IBMer) is that that friendlyness is only in parts of the company; much of IBM is open-source hostile.

As a result of this news, though, wouldn't you be inclined to suspect that the hostile faction just took a massive blow?

[deleted]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#505

Post by Cyphase »

cosinetau wrote: post #487
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the impression that nobody at all on HN was happy about the GitHub thing, FWIW.

I'm sorry, I'm in the PNW. I think I just got caught in my own damn bubble.

PNW = Pacific Northwest (of the continental United States), for anyone who doesn't know; it's not an initialism I use/see too often myself, and I live in California.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#506

Post by Reason077 »

puzzle wrote: post #391
Reason077 wrote: post #307

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.

Right. What I should have said was “should have hung onto the stock that I got from exercising the employee stock options”.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#507

Post by tyree731 »

ezoe wrote: post #471
lotsofcows wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You’re fundamentally wrong here. Red Hat providing a long-term and stable operating system and software target provides stability to users of RHEL. Upgrading your operating system, system libraries and toolchain are valuable changes, and should be done periodically, but these changes, like any other, introduce instability across the change. Those risks can be mitigated, but they are risks nonetheless.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#508

Post by adetrest »

ethbro wrote: post #423
SwellJoe wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM is, as far a I can tell, the best example of a "mixed bag" in tech. I have heard both great and terrible things about IBM from customers, employees, developers on Open Source projects, etc. They are a huge organization, and one that seems more divided than many. It may be more useful to view IBM as a collection of fiefdoms rather than a single, focused, entity. Yes, the money all goes into one pot at the end of t…

On acquisitions, I can offer the anecdote of a friend working at a startup IBM purchased. Things started with "IBM loves you, and pledges to stay hands off and help you do what you're already doing", continued to "We're going to replace a few management positions with folks from IBM" and "We're changing some benefits, titles, and procedures to better align with The IBM Way", and finally ended up with "You aren't meet…

Isn't it how pretty much any acquisition goes? That's my experience from the inside anyway. All hell breaks loose once the golden handcuffs have expired (3 years mark usually?) and people including management can quit with a full payout.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#509

Post by shaklee3 »

neuromantik8086 wrote: post #429
shaklee3 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've followed POWER for a while now, and it seems to be mostly marketing hype. The POWER8 was not much better than the Xeons out, and had almost no availability. POWER9 excels at a lot of IO-bound tasks, but again, it's nearly impossible to find. It doesn't help that there are very few systems you can buy out there. On paper, the POWER9 looks awesome. Then you look closer at the actual architecture and realize that a…

My impression is that POWER is more suitable for certain types of scientific computation that require high degrees of precision rather than for general purpose enterprise use. POWER9 is the only CPU architecture out there that has support for quad-precision floats. Alas, no CPU exists with support for octuple floats, since only astrophysicists need that level of precision.

Right, and that's what we were evaluating it for. It's also the only one with pcie4, 8 memory channels, and CAPI. Nonetheless, it needs software and libraries to be updated to use some of these, and in many cases, they're not.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#510

Post by phkahler »

OpenBSD-reich wrote: post #251
kartan wrote: post #170

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…

According to their 10Q and 10K filings, IBM is over seventy percent a consultation business with less than ten percent of revenue being made from hardware.

So with RedHat and the remains of IBMs hardware division, they make a push into the cloud with their own RISC-V servers with chips fabbed on an advanced node and with a full software stack driven by both IBM and RedHat developers. They'd be vertical in their cloud offerings.

You don't need to tell me I'm hallucinating - I know. But it's fun to imagine something good coming from this rather than the simple destruction of RedHat.

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