IBM acquires Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#571

Post by cheez » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 11:56 PM UTC

TylerJewell wrote: post #502

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...

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is the real fear.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#572

Post by _ea1k » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 11:56 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #307

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.

”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!)

Red Hat does incentivize patent applications, but the purpose has been defensive. The entire process makes that clear as does the licensing.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#573

Post by ir193 » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 11:57 PM UTC

It's not about IBM at all. We have AWS/Azure/GCP out there. IBM and Red Hat? That reminds me Intel+samsung or Nokia+Qt when there are already Android/iOS/WP.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#574

Post by dang » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 12:01 AM UTC

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”

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322548 and marked it off-topic.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#575

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 12:01 AM UTC

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

#576

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 12:01 AM UTC

prepend wrote: post #392

cosinetau wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Others pointed out that the Github merger wasn’t all positive, but Microsoft is at least a software company. IBM is a consulting company and their model is really different than RedHat. Competing with AWS and Microsoft is pretty crazy and does not make sense to me. RedHat’s value is in its software, not its cloud delivery. And, frankly, I depend a little more on centos/fedora than I do Github.

> Others pointed out that the Github merger wasn’t all positive, but Microsoft is at least a software company.

> IBM is a consulting company and their model is really different than RedHat.

Maybe the complementariness of this could be good?

(Yes, Microsoft is a software company, but they produce a particular type of software which is why many people weren't thrilled about their acquisition of Github.)

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#577

Post by dang » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 12:03 AM UTC

severino wrote: post #161

Well, I don't know anybody in the FOSS community which would be worried it systemd became endangered ;)

Please don't troll threads, intentionally or not, by throwing in classic flamebait. It seems funny at the time, and then we get another systemd or whatever flamewar.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322395 and marked it off-topic.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#578

Post by Conan_Kudo » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 12:04 AM UTC

shaklee3 wrote: post #568

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I run Origin for my employer. It's pretty easy these days since you can do all of it with openshift-ansible and other related tools.

I know there are plenty of others like that, as well.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#579

Post by dang » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 12:08 AM UTC

mrep wrote: post #570

dang wrote: 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…

This happens whenever a story is changing rapidly. It doesn't have to do with merging the threads—it has to do with different comments dating from when different information was available. In this case the initial story was "might acquire" and then turned into "has acquired". The threads weren't neatly partitioned before we merged them; people just post to whichever discussion they happen to see.

When a story has been changing while the comments have been accumulating, HN readers are smart enough to figure it out, and I'm not sure adding new software would help much.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#580

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 12:08 AM UTC

mrep wrote: post #570

dang wrote: 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…

[deleted]