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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you'd rather go back to Upstart or SysV? Really?

I'd rathe someone take another shot at service management. I don't want to hold onto everything about SysV style systems - I love SMF in Solaris! - but I'd definitely prefer a leaner and more focused approach to development than we see with systemd.

It is interesting that you bring up SMF. For me systemd mostly seems like saner implementation of SMF.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#562

Assuming RedHat was in a 'sell or die' situation[1] I'm glad it was IBM that stepped in rather than Oracle. [1] I have no reason to believe that it was a dire situation at RedHat, I make the observation that companies that are meeting their goals and doing what they want, don't generally get acquired just because.

If it was a sell-or-die situation IBM wouldn't have offered such a hefty markup over the market price and they would have used less cash and more shares to pay for it.

I think it's been obvious to everyone for a year or two that someone was going to buy Red Hat; I feel that no small part of their share price rising over the last 18 months has priced in that expectation.

Like everyone else I am mostly pleased that they didn't get bought by Oracle.

Disclosure: I work for a competing company, Pivotal, so feel free to treat my observations as motivated by ... I dunno, actually. I'm looking for a cool French word here but "ennui" isn't quite fitting.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#563
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where’s the history of IBM buying and sun setting companies? I don’t have the same prejudice towards IBM that I do for Oracle. But I’m not in a position to know. I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.

Sequent, though I can't see them doing the same things to RH.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#564
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that you can draw a line where it does not count as "core product", but Eclipse has to count as something.

The motivation behind Eclipse/JWT was similar to the French supporting American rebels in the late 18th century. It had nothing to do with what they stood for and everything to do with being able to poke a stick in the eye of their most hated enemy (Sun and Great Britain, respectively). Hell, the name and logo even tells you what they're trying to do.

You are a bit unkind to the French: ideological affinity between American and French revolutionaires clearly went beyond their hatred for a common enemy, as proven by the overall shape of resulting Constitutions.

I do agree on the aims of the Eclipse project though.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#565

$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.

> What would they need from Canonical, really?

Staff, existing customer relationships and credibility.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#566
So, with SUSE getting sold to some equity firm and Red Hat being bought by Oracle's slightly less evil twin brother, is Canonical really the only "independent" Linux OS vendor left? And here I thought this was going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop™...

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#567
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 major tech companies file patents - shouldn't be surprising that it's going to be part of the job.

Not just tech companies. I work at a bank and we've filed a bunch of software/algorithm/tech patents.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#568

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.

Is openshift really open source? I was under the impression that nobody really runs origin on its own since it's far too hard. It seemed more like they just wanted to point out but it's open source, but you need support and a lot of know-how to actually use it.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#569
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…

I really don't understand the point of this anecdote. This is standard practice for almost every acquisition. If the startup didn't want to be part of the IBM way of doing things they shouldn't have agreed to be acquired by IBM. In fact the rare situation was the Facebook "acquire but treat more like an independent subsidiary" model. And even that didn't last all that long.

Re: "Importantly, Red Hat is still Red Hat. When the transaction closes, as I noted above, we will be a distinct unit within IBM and I will report directly to Ginni. [...] They understand and value how and why we are different and they are committed to allowing us to remain Red Hat while scaling and accelerating all that makes us great with their resources."

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#570
post #155

There were several threads about this. We merged them into the one that was posted first. We changed the url to the most readable and least press-releasey. The others were: https://twitter.com/EdHammondNY/status/1056604618015285248 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-sa... https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-r...

In my opinion: Either invest in developing hacker news support for updated news comment threads better (my recommendation is to split each thread by the original article/time in a megathread and use the newest title for the base merged thread and sort the sub-threads by time or stop merging these threads because it makes it so freaking confusing as the comments are based on totally different contexts and yet they are all intermingled.

Prime other example being the tesla going private thread which I think is this one but I'm not sure because the threads are so hacked together or duped I cannot find a hacker news link to the original tweet [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709799

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