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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#651

Post by techntoke »

signal11 wrote: post #344
beatgammit wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year. What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?

Ubuntu (Canonical) just stared looking more attractive as they were trying to be an independent commercially-supported Linux offering. Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.

I'd rather corporate users sponsor Arch. My guess is Canonical will be announcing they are getting acquired by Microsoft soon.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#652

Post by techntoke »

OpenBSD-reich wrote: post #241
solatic wrote: post #153

It's like Vader asked Luke to join him in defeating the Emperor (Microsoft) and ruling the galaxy as father and son - and instead of the audience hearing "I'll never join you!!", we hear "sure, let's team up." The cognitive dissonance is so strong here. WTF just happened? If you asked me a month ago to put down serious money in Vegas on this never happening, I'd have happily done so. What on Earth were they thinking?…

Hopefully this will cause an uptick in Gentoo (and OpenBSD)!

And Arch Linux.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#653

Post by techntoke »

eyalm wrote: post #325

Cloud native/kubernetes race is just exploding. RH strategy was mostly focused around OpenShift lately, which makes complete sense. Kubernetes is the next datacenter OS, just as ESX (and virtualization in general) was in the past 15 years and it's going to drive a radical shift in the enterprise IT world in the coming years. IBM (as an active member of the kubernetes community) see that huge opportunity and are doubl…

Canonical will likely be acquired by Microsoft.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#654

Post by moocowtruck »

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...

whats a WSO2

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#655

Post by jtl999 »

bunderbunder wrote: post #648
jtl999 wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I do understand your point, but I wouldn't spin it that way or bring it up with them, just start committing using a "new" identity, assuming they have no knowledge of your "main" identity.

Easier said then done.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#656

Post by bunderbunder »

threeseed wrote: post #531
ethbro wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On acquisitions, I can offer the anecdote of a friend working at a startup IBM purchased. Things started with "IBM loves you, and pledges to stay hands off and help you do what you're already doing", continued to "We're going to replace a few management positions with folks from IBM" and "We're changing some benefits, titles, and procedures to better align with The IBM Way", and finally ended up with "You aren't meet…

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.

> 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 this situation, I don't think it makes sense to think of an organization as a single, monolithic entity. In this context, the only sane way to think about Red Hat is as over 12,000 employees, plus I-don't-know-how-many shareholders.

Only a very small number of those "agreed to be acquired by IBM". Probably less than 0.1% of them. They are probably also going to be the ones who are going to be the least affected by how IBM operates internally. They've now got FU money, so, as soon as whatever retention agreements they may or may not have signed expire, they'll be prancing out the door.

Everyone else probably knows very little about it - the linked press release indicates that this is probably a surprise for about 12,000 Red Hat employees, most of whom won't be getting any additional details until tomorrow's all hands meeting.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#658

Post by marcus_holmes »

skybrian wrote: post #258
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.

This is rather normal, not pathological. Most companies like to file patents, definitely including startups. Where do you think their patents come from, if not from work their employees do? It's work that's worth paying for. Having some proprietary code doesn't prevent companies from also making substantial contributions to open source in other areas.

actually, the normal advice for startups these days is to not file patents. They're expensive and pretty much useless. They used to be worthwhile because investors liked them, but investors aren't so hot on them any more (because expensive and usually indefensible).

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#659

Post by zie »

monocasa wrote: post #281
zie wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it. RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn't necessarily open, and it's not yet really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)

Where's the source to Power 9 then?

https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation and https://github.com/open-power

This is not the entire source, but if you join the foundation you get the chip blueprints, etc.

But the entire BIOS is open. that's huge.

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