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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not consider Open or NetBSD? They can make nice desktops, and OpenBSD is very friendly on laptops. And they are lighter than Fedora and perform much better. And, they use a maximally free license, but this is simply my preference. You may feel different.

I wouldn’t say that OpenBSD is friendly on laptops, especially on laptops made in the past five years or so.

I've always been told that ThinkPad should work, even relatively modern ones. Is that not true?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#612
Every aquisition I've been a part of immediately resulted in a massive brain drain as everyone who made the aquired company great jumps ship. I wonder if Redhat's competitors are licking their chops.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#613
post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I think the implication is that Canonical are in the same, shrinking market. Whilst I assume Ubuntu Server has a smaller market share (though I have no figured to back this up), are they not going to end up in the same spot where they can't really progress?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#614
When I worked for IBM (via acquisition), I wanted to fix bugs in Cygwin (owned by Red Hat). Red Hat does not accept patches unless you get permission from your current employer. I could not get anybody in IBM to sign Red Hat's permission slip. Nobody would sign because it's all risk, no reward from IBM's point of view.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#615
post #9

RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will experience vendor hate to a high degree. But, RH is based on open source. A replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.

Well yeah, there's CentOS, so a company just needs to step up and provide the level of support RHEL customers expect. I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in. I really don't understand this acquisition.

[deleted]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#616

> Second quarter total revenue of $823 million, up 14% year-over-year, or 14% in constant currency ARR around $3.3 billion. I think they have sold the company very cheap. Source - https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-repor...

I wouldn't have sold also, but IBM paid an 80% premium. Not exactly cheap.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#617
post #42

If IBM has one brain cell left, they'll pull a NeXT/Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company. That is the one path to a real future for IBM instead of its slow decline into complete irrelevance.

Not likely according to CNBC interview [1]:

> Rometty told CNBC that the deal should not be interpreted as part of any plan for her to transition out of her position as CEO at IBM.

> "I'm still young and I'm not going anywhere," she told CNBC.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-de...

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#618
post #126

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…

Also in practice glibc, systemd, GNOME, etc. have a ton of maintainers from Red Hat, even if they're not Red Hat-owned the way Ansible or Ceph is.

Yeah the whole freedesktop.org stack is to a large extent RedHat folks.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#619
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.

Their iSeries service isn’t bad as soon as you get by the screening person whose grasp of English leaves a lot to be desired. Talking to one of their actual techs has solved everything I’ve asked. It does probably help that machine phones home when it needs parts replaced.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#620
post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Standard acquisition speak. Means nothing.
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