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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#661

Post by zie »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #317
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 :)

Their open power initiative is really no more "open source" than say Intel's processors, with the possible exception of Management Engine shenanigans from Intel.

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

It's a lot more open than Intel's. You can get the hardware chip blueprints if you join the foundation.

But the firmware is all Apache 2 licensed.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#662

Post by bunderbunder »

jtl999 wrote: post #655
bunderbunder wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That dishonesty is exactly what makes it fraudulent.

They're asking you to sign some legal documentation. If you forge a signature rather than getting it signed by your employer, that's fraud. If you create a false identity in order to hide the fact that you have an employer, that's also fraud.

You have exactly two legal (and, just as importantly, honest) options in this situation: Get permission from your employer before contributing, or don't contribute. If you like the project and don't want to create trouble for its maintainers, you will pick one of those two options.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#663

Post by tim-- »

techntoke wrote: post #651
signal11 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except corporate users usually want support.

It does make me wonder though if it would ever be possible for a bunch of business savy open source developers could ever get around to creating an open source co-op. Something like the commercial version of the FSF. Build open source products with solid support contracts, and build/contribute to open source that way.

The organization would be owned by the very people building and contributing the code.

RedHat is the only company that I can see that really did everything in the open.

I'm not sure which one I feel worse about, Oracle buying Sun, or IBM buying RedHat? I feel that Oracle did some major missteps in their acquisition (for this I look squarely at OpenOffice, and their misshandling of it, although, the OOo community hated the Oracle acquisition from day one, which I guess might have made it a little like poison berries - no one would want to go near it).

Oracle completely ruined MySQL during the acquisition too.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#664

Post by seenitall »

zapita wrote: post #476

This was to be expected. Red Hat had no future as an independent company. Their flagship product RHEL still dominates their revenue 20 years later... But they have already saturated the enterprise Linux server market, and that market is in decline. All attempts to diversify have failed. Openshift and Ansible have potential, but compared to the decline of their core business, it’s too little too late. The current CEO…

Yup

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#666

Post by abtinf »

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.

I left IBM a few months ago, but I led a bunch of developer advocacy efforts for a couple years.

There are several internal programs at IBM that enable employees to make contributions to open source with very little bureaucracy. Go to the intranet site w3.developer.ibm.com for details.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#667

Post by rodgerd »

bsg75 wrote: post #629
rodgerd wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

On the interwebs? No idea. Mine would be:

GPFS is excellent as a clustered filesystem backing a number of servers that need high-throughput, low latency, coherent storage. It's block-oriented.

Ceph is a SAN replacement: can saturate 100 GBps switches with massive parallel throughput. Object based, can also serve up block and (recently, with limits) cooked filesystem.

Gluster is a distributed filesystem - easy to set up and configure, some performance limitations, file rather than object or block oriented.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#668

Post by stephen_g »

newnewpdro wrote: post #369
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?…

> Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Goddamnit. RedHat is a public company, in what fantasy land do you exist where this isn't expected? Furthermore, the deal is still subject to shareholder approval: > The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat. It is subject to Red Hat shareholder approval. It also is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.…

Selling out is not necessarily the “duty” of the board of directors. It could definitely be in the interest of shareholders to stay independent.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#669

Post by filmgirlcw »

RandomTisk wrote: post #545
pinewurst wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't fire theirs - they ordered them to move to an arbitrary office, most commonly not the closest geographically either, without relocation money. If you didn't move, it was considered a voluntary departure. There was often no room at these offices even for the minority who accepted the moves. It was/is a deliberate attempt to dispose of senior, less portable people without having to pay layoff charges. Who n…

Holy bleep, have any good references for this?

ProPublica did an incredible investigation into this:

https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...

https://www.propublica.org/article/investigating-ibm-digital...

The second link, which details how the reporting for the story happened, explains how older workers were often given 90 days to move thousands of miles to "an office" or else lose their jobs.

-- The results are stunning and should shock and scare all of us, whether we're in our 20s, 30s, or beyond. Because we all age -- this is a fact. And if the IBMs of the world can get off scott free, other companies may do this too.

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