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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#621

Post by hnzix »

simcop2387 wrote: post #610
snorrah wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super pessimistic point of view. Why do you think these are all in danger? These are things that people and more importantly enterprises use. Why would IBM ruin that?

Exactly, these are products to monetize and make money from.

Sure rationally the products should be a success, that's why IBM bought them. But GloboMegaCorps have a consistent record of acquiring great products then running them into the ground by smothering them with shitty internal policies.

It seems like a fair % of SVers haven't had the pleasure of working for one of these Kafkaesque giants. They operate on dream logic and risk aversion.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#622

Post by pishpash »

phkahler wrote: post #518
janc_ wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle sales means promising everything and delivering half of that at best. Are you sure you want to use that as an example?

...promising everything and delivering half of that at best... I work for a company driven by sales people. It sucks. They keep promising things we don't have and complaining that engineering can't deliver. IMHO a good sales person should be able to sell what we have. Any jackass can make empty promises.

Make them do proper accounting, an empty promise costs more engineering dollars than a believable one, and the difference should not be determined by sales.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#623

Post by pfranz »

shaklee3 wrote: post #322
pfranz wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative? All of the places I've worked that used Red Hat never explicitly looked at the Red Hat support timeline. They looked at their business, the software they used, the features they needed, and based their upgrade cycles around that. They'd only upgrade the major versions of their primary software when a project would benefit and skipped major updates that were problematic. At my current job they'…

Ubuntu seems like a good replacement. We use it, and I greatly appreciate that the compiler is not stuck on barely getting C++11 support.

The problem isn't that RedHat's release cycle was too long, it's that companies want support for 5 year release cycles. Most places I've been don't even look at testing a major version of a new OS for at least year. There are just too many variables between hardware, drivers, and software and little to no benefit in staying bleeding edge.

Let's say there was a new feature. It might be an improvement in almost every regard, but how it behaves at the limits or when left unattended might not play well with every other piece in the system. Part of it might be changing user/business expectations, or changing the pieces around, but that can literally take years.

A few wrinkles I've heard about, but haven't directly dealt with is that RHEL7/systemd is too polite about unmounting disks on shutdown which means it will just hang. This is a huge problem for remote workstations that don't have IPMI. Another issue I've heard about is issues with a bunch of our diskless servers don't play well with it. Having to migrate and troubleshoot core issues like these every 2 years is just unfeasible.

As you point out, just working at a place where everything is 10 years old is frustrating, too. Last week I was trying to build VLC, which requires C++11 and had issues. At previous jobs I pushed really hard for a new enough kernel to evaluate Docker and have spent a lot of time selling people on Git.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#624

Post by Spivak »

sprash wrote: post #405
dijit wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy. There are more options than those. SystemD won because it had been adopted already and was supported by a major company in FOSS

False dichotomy indeed. Right now I'm testing runit (on void linux) for my production machines. My experience since more than a year: Once it runs it runs, literally zero surprises so far. The general volatility of systemd introduces so many unstable elements in your system, that it really makes you think if the added risk it is really worth the value it offers (even though I'm still not quiet sure what the value of…

I'm not exactly surprised that someone who isn't using systemd for anything is getting little value from it. If you really want to give it a fair chance go all in on 'the systemd way' and you'll wonder how you ever got by without it.

- Services can depend on mounts, sockets, paths, or other servives. Don't start the NFS server until your backend storage is online and mounted and stop it if it goes offline.

- Are you annoyed when Symantec is chewing through your CPU? Use systemctl --edit and cap it at 20% with one CPUQuota option.

- Have a NodeJS service you want to bind to port 80 but not run as root? AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE and you're done.

- Want to automount a directory? Drop in an .automount file or add an option to fstab and you're done.

- Replace GRUB with systemd-boot and enjoy configuring boot options with simple INI files.

- Want to do offline updates? Have any service you want be part of system-update.target, touch /system-update and reboot.

- Annoyed that you can't have more than 3 dns servers or can't run DNSoTLS or DNSoHTTPS? systemd-resolved has your back.

- Forget about ntpd or chrony and use systemd-timesyncd is a lightweight standards complaint ntp client.

- Run all your userspace daemons like offlineimap, tmux, emacs, your dev server, etc. as systemd user services.

- Manage the permissions, resource usage, and monitor long running jobs with systemd-run.

- Replace cron with systemd timers that not only have more powerful timespecs, are hooked into the dependency solver, and can be monitored like any other service.

- Isolate troublesome 3rd party applications with systemd-portable which are a bit like privileged containers but easier to use.

- Run apps as unprivileged users without having to fill passwd with users and groups just for services with dynamic users.

These are just the ones off the top of my head. It boggles my mind how people say that systemd doesn't provide value.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#625

Post by gautamdivgi »

sz4kerto wrote: post #52

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 with RH's recent acquisition of CoreOS, that suite will also be in IBM's arena. I work for "a corporate". We used to be big IBM shops (AIX, IBM Java, websphere, etc, etc...). But AIX is now hardly used and neither is websphere. It's mostly off the shelf k8s, wildfly and other open source projects deployed on RHEL (not my personal favorite since its kernel is way behind the times). I think this is IBMs way of playing catch up in the arena. I worry how they will handle entrenched "political interests" - e.g. Webpshere/AIX/etc.. and the more open source friendly RedHat suite. Pretty sure its going to be one big mess in a few years time.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#626

Post by rodgerd »

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…

> GPFS, which is a shining beacon compared to ceph and gluster.

Solves an entirely different problem.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#627

Post by ianai »

dang wrote: post #574
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.

Discussing economics is off topic in a business merger? Its completely on topic. Economics is literally the study of scarce resource allocation. In the US, that’s everything from personal choice, business operations, through to global considerations.

To quote the dictionary “a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services”

It’s my understanding that HN is for technical discussions and business discussions. That’s exactly what my comment discussed. Further, that book by Galbraith is widely considered the gold standard for the Great Depression.

TLDR: if you want hacker news to be taken seriously as a place to discuss business and tech then my comment is appropriate in a merger discussion.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#628

Post by anonymous192836 »

(Don't want to use my regular id for this)

We were transitioning from an old IBM app stack to a Red Hat stack. I was spending a lot of time trying to make this happen.

This news makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time - it is so ironic.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#629

Post by bsg75 »

rodgerd wrote: post #626
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…

> GPFS, which is a shining beacon compared to ceph and gluster. Solves an entirely different problem.

Is there a short summary of which problems are solved by which filesystem?
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