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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#541

Post by mcguire »

SwellJoe wrote: post #441
ethbro wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds about right. And, I suspect it'll happen to Red Hat, too, despite the fact that Red Hat is a money printing machine. They've been literally unbelievably effective at turning open source into profit (as someone who's tried to make money on building Open Source software for roughly 20 years, I find it difficult to comprehend how much money Red Hat makes). I've even occasionally considered applying at Red Ha…

If you compare Oracle and IBM, Oracle comes off as competent.

Not in terms of technical ability; they are about equivalent. But for everything else, IBM is just a lame copy.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#543

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#544

Post by xorcist »

raesene9 wrote: post #434
eyalm wrote: 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 becom…

Rancher desperately needs to find a niche.

Docker seems to be determined to strike it out on their own. The implications of Kubernetes takes time to materialize, and they might well sell too late.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#545

Post by RandomTisk »

pinewurst wrote: post #128
closeparen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat has a significant remote workforce. IBM famously fired theirs. Can we expect IBM to do the same to Red Hat's?

They didn't fire theirs - they ordered them to move to an arbitrary office, most commonly not the closest geographically either, without relocation money. If you didn't move, it was considered a voluntary departure. There was often no room at these offices even for the minority who accepted the moves. It was/is a deliberate attempt to dispose of senior, less portable people without having to pay layoff charges. Who n…

Holy bleep, have any good references for this?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#546

Post by dhimes »

I would feel a lot better about this if their other recently acquired properties showed a better user experience, especially weather underground and the weather channel.

I'm not an IBM hater by any means. My FIL was a beemer; I have a good friend who is still one, along with various others I've known through my life. I cut my teeth on IBM mainframes, and my nostalgia for things like xterm stem from that.

But their recent track record is troubling. To an outsider it seems like they haven't formed a cohesive corporate strategy, and they've been making things up quarter to quarter.

I don't feel good about this, I'm sorry to say. I hope I'm wrong.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#547

Post by sabujp »

KaiserPro wrote: post #238

So, I have mixed feelings. I don't think in the short term this will be a problem. However IBM has lost it's way. its a very large unwieldy organisation that doesn't change very fast. It also has an awful lot of lifers, who would flounder horribly outside the soft warm IBM shell. But, there are some brilliant engineers and technologies that are inside IBM. The ones I know are about are to do with GPFS, which is a shi…

if gpfs still has NSD limits it ain't gonna work on a cloud scale

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#548

Post by mcguire »

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.

I worked for IBM in the early '90s and again in the early 2000s, on a number of high visibility projects.

None of them shipped.

IBM sucks, and this is the worst news I've heard in a very long time.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#549

Post by profalseidol »

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…

Horay for Free Market! This is why all our stuff are low quality now as all the brands are actually owned by 1 mega corp.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#550

Post by zapita »

83sjeodeke wrote: post #481
zapita wrote: post #476

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…

Do you think Ubuntu has a future as an independent company?

I don’t understand your question, sorry. Can you explain what you mean?
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