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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#671

Post by bunderbunder »

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.

Sales people typically do exactly what they're paid to do - no more, no less. You can shout at them 'til you're blue in the face about overpromising, but, if you've got their pay structure set up such that they can earn more commission by making wild promises, then they're going to keep on making wild promises.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#672

Post by gbrayut »

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...

"We expect OpenShift to become the dominant brand for Kubernetes."

That seems like a strong statement that I didn't see any backing for in the blog post. Care to expand? I haven't seen much settling in the k8s space. In fact it looks like things are still heating up with many companies pivoting in that direction.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#673

Post by snowwrestler »

7ewis wrote: post #442
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?

What is the relationship between RHEL and CentOS? Never actually used RHEL, but I've heard that they're basically the same - one comes with the support, the other obviously doesn't. Is CentOS supported by Red Hat, so IBM in theory could shut them down?

I can't find the reference, but Red Hat recently hugged CentOS after sort of passively ignoring it for a while. Now, as I understand it, Red Hat has committed to actively supporting CentOS.

They're different products for different customers. Folks who want to work cheap and hack their own stuff together will use CentOS and would never have bought a RHEL license anyway.

Meanwhile, folks who need a "we've got support" answer for every question will use RHEL and wouldn't be tempted by CentOS anyway; the cost savings is not worth the risk.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#674

Post by gbraad »

bunderbunder wrote: post #662
jtl999 wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

The reason this permission exists is that contributions will not be owned by your employer, but will be part of the project. It depends on your employer if they allow you to work on personal software that they do not claim ownership for or not. I think you are right to not use a pseudonym. I once did, and regret having done so.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#675

Post by halflings »

sytse wrote: post #478
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.

IBMs revenue comes from consulting but a lot of their profit comes from software https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-split-between-IT-and-consu... In their latest quarter https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-3Q18-Earnings-Chart... $4.1b of revenue came from Cognitive Solutions (mostly solutions software) at a 76% gross profit while their global business services with the same revenue had a gross profit of only 29.8…

Is "Cognitive Solutions" mainly their AI efforts? [1] If that's the case, and given the terrible feedback they've received from many of their Watson customers (and anecdotes from people working on it)... I am tempted to say that the future is bleak for IBM, and that people will ultimately discover that they were paying a fortune for something that does not match what's advertised (they've put millions into advertising Watson with nonsensical ads)...

...but then again, many enterprise solutions that are incredibly over-engineered, slow and costly are still alive and kicking, so who knows.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/getting-started...

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#676

Post by gbrayut »

moocowtruck wrote: post #654
TylerJewell wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSO2

A previous employer used their identity server for a SSO system. It did what we needed it to and seemed like it was well written.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#677

Post by flukus »

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.

Corporate users can barely get around to patching windows desktops and are happy with Redhat being so slow moving, they're not going to jump on the arch constant upgrade cycle anytime soon.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#678

Post by exikyut »

shaklee3 wrote: post #315
filereaper wrote: post #130

I'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-…

I've followed POWER for a while now, and it seems to be mostly marketing hype. The POWER8 was not much better than the Xeons out, and had almost no availability. POWER9 excels at a lot of IO-bound tasks, but again, it's nearly impossible to find. It doesn't help that there are very few systems you can buy out there. On paper, the POWER9 looks awesome. Then you look closer at the actual architecture and realize that a…

Based on your subcomment about evaluation, I'm very interested to hear your opinions about Talos' offerings - up to now I've only heard anecdotes from individuals drinking the security+ownership kool-aid.

What IBM offers is probably a lot more coherent and takes better advantage of what the POWER architecture has to offer, such as larger quantities of RAM, the per-node interconnect fabric, faster I/O (not just PCIe), etc (admittedly totally naive here). Plus of course there's z/OS, which I know enough about to respect (and want to play with someday :) ).

Talos basically offers only Linux and a mildly DIY standing-up experience (https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-rap...), although this is likely to be reasonably painless for non-desktop configurations (and perhaps volume orders can come preconfigured).

As a bit of a pet idea I kind of want to colocate one of the 2U or 4U systems for generic web serving and similar duties, but I fear that running a blog/discussion system on such a machine may result in a constant effort (on my part) at keeping discussion focused on the "it's a different architecture, what comp-sci interesting things can we do with it" aspect instead of getting distracted by shallow OCD-meta-security bikeshedding.

(It's kind of sad that the collective consensus about new/different architectures has to always be about security nowadays, and not about unbiased exploration, which is what we're best at)

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#679

Post by ajdlinux »

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'm a current IBMer, and there is a process for getting CLAs signed - it's a bit bureaucratic if it's not a CLA for a company we already work with, but otherwise IBM has no problems with contributing to projects like that.
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