A big loser here is Microsoft. IBM has basically just purchased Linux at the time when Microsoft has finally embraced it.
Nah, they'll end up picking up Canonical. I'm guessing this acquisition was preemptive.
IBM acquires Red Hat
641–650 of 1001 posts
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#642If 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.
RH are good at a LOT of things but sales remains a bit of a weak point compared to Oracle and to a lesser degree IBM. Hopefully the RH guys can bring back a focus on technology to IBM while IBM figure out how to sell it to customers. PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?
> PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?
Purple hat.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#643Ay ay ay... if this is true then everything from RH is gonna get fatter, slower and more expensive. Add a bit of WebSphere here, a bit of Domino there and voila. It'll then be ready for 'resource action' (aka layoffs). Jokes aside, RH is an engineer-focussed business - IBM is an accountant-focussed business. There's just NO way these two cultures are going to work well together.
RH has been a sales-based organization.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#644I 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!!
I completely agree. I feel the same about MS buying Github, too. We are seeing so much consolidation in so many markets, the only true outcome will be that it will be a worse environment for the rest of us.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#645Guys, 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.
Meh. They have a bad reputation due to calling open word source software cancer the new windows business model.
Also, while their engineers are certainly smart, their software seems very crusty (the down side of infinite backwards compatibility) and usually doesn't play well at all with existing open source software. Thus: Mostly useless.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#646Earlier 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.
big typo on your home page "by using our our open source"
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#647I'm surprised at the amount of backlash here. IBM's had the Linux Technology Center (LTC) for a long time and has been contributing to the community. All the platforms Z, POWER etc... support Linux as a first class citizen and plenty of other ecosystems are also supported (i.e GCC, OpenJDK, etc...) Maybe its time to re-evaluate the old biases? The old incumbents like Microsoft have warmed up to OSS, not sure why Big-…
No, it's time to start remembering history and that if we don't learn from it, we're doomed to repeat it.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#648When 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?
I think that, if you were to ask open source maintainers, "What would you think of me committing fraud to get around your project's policies?" most of them would say, "Thanks, but no thanks."
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#649When 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.
This actually seems like fair policy to me, think of the mess Red Hat would be in if IBM decided that they had copyright on your contributions to Cygwin.
Or is my understanding of copyright law off base?
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#650Proud to be part of Americas 5 companies!