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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#631

Post by rodgerd »

dragandj wrote: post #461
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 don't have any contacts with IBM business-wise, so my question might sound naive: Why 90% services revenue would be a problem? They have to fund these R&D and open source contributions somehow.

Because literally every conversation turns into a services upsell.

I've migrated a site from WAS to JBoss. The support experience is night and day. WAS on IBM OS on IBM hardware not working? Pay a four-figure-per-day consult to be told that's just how WAS works on that platform, buy more hardware.

Same application on JBoss, problems with performance, RH dropped experts in as part of the support contract.

This is not a one-off in my experience. RH, Microsoft, other vendors I deal with treat a lot of these things as covered by your enterprise support contracts. IBM treat it as a chance to upsell a services engagement, and maybe pitch that the work should be outsourced, too.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#633

Post by solarkraft »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #625
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 pla…

They _did_ pay a lot of money to acquire them, so there's a reason to believe they're committed to fully integrating RH technology. Considering Jim, who certainly has an interest in the survival of open source software, signed this off also gives some hope.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#634

Post by paulddraper »

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…

> They won't be able to execute it properly, but they have the potential.

AKA The last two decades of IBM.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#635

Post by techntoke »

Stratoscope wrote: post #603
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…

> I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS. Doesnt Microsoft tick all those boxes? Even if they aren't exclusively an open source company, they are "absolutely behind OSS" if you go by how much open source code they have contributed.

Mostly useless projects though for people that want speed and Linux-native open source.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#636

Post by nunez »

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.

OpenShift comes in two variants: Enterprise and Origin. Everything you can do in Enterprise can be done in Origin (Origin is ahead of Enterprise), but Enterprise comes with support.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#637

Post by solarkraft »

TylerJewell wrote: post #398
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.

WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.

I'm happy for you, really. But you being in 6th place with 50M$ in revenue says worries me about the market.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#638

Post by rodgerd »

cmurf wrote: post #304
bloopernova wrote: post #187

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?

The boilerplate and vague statement of Red Hat remaining a distinct unit doesn't really tell us anything. More relevant is what the CentOS and Fedora communities think of this acquisition, because no matter what they are community driven projects. There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out. I'm curious what openSU…

> I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.

OpenSuSE has been more like Fedora over their years; they historically never had a CentOS equivalent (although the newer OpenSuSE is moving there).

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#639

Post by kurczynski »

I am so sad about this. There is nothing good that I see coming out of this, but I hope that's just my bias. Red Hat has been a huge contributed to Linux and open source for years, I want to keep my Fedora!!

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#640

Post by jtl999 »

jhallenworld wrote: post #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.

Couldn't you just submit patches under a pseudonym?
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