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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#703

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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.

I run Origin for my employer. It's pretty easy these days since you can do all of it with openshift-ansible and other related tools. I know there are plenty of others like that, as well.

We run OKD (formerly Origin, the project was rebranded) as well and have for two years in just a couple weeks. It's been a pivotal part of our application stack since we adopted it, the developers on my team love being able to paste in a git URL and have an application live in a few minutes.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Cygwin would get more steam, a new package manager and a repository...

Why wouldn't you use WSL?

I haven't used Windows in quite some time, but I believe they are quite different. WSL is more like a very basic version of Wine in that it implements Linux system calls and can execute ELF binaries, and as such requires you to install a host OS for libc and any other libraries you want. Cygwin is more like Winelib in that it provides a custom libc implementation and toolchain that are natively compiled, and as such requires you to rebuild your applications.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#705
post #146

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Add Fedora to the list - while technically a community project, Red Hat is the main contributor.

It seems to me that Red Hat is based on Fedora. Fedora being the fast release gratis community version and Red Hat the slow release commercial corporate version. Then CentOS would the community gratis version of Red Hat.

That's basically how Red Hat describes it:

Fedora - Community Innovation

RHEL - Commercial Production

CentOS - Community Adoption

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#706

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I have the same problem in academia, being in a non-CS department, I'm required to notify the University's Center for Technology & Venture Commercialization about assigning my copyright over software to another entity (like the FSF), but so far I have been unsuccessful at getting them to sign the letter the FSF wants, despite the code I would be contributing being completely outside of my work at the University and s…

What if you would just publish your code on GitHub, would they seek to punish you?

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#707
post #629

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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…

GPFS is very much file oriented - there's iSCSI target support but I'd be surprised if anyone really used it.

Ceph can provide block (mostly used for VMs), object and file targets, in that order of maturity.

Gluster is sort of a metafilesystem, aggregating some number of underlying filesystems - file being the operative word.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#708
post #304

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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 wonder if the Fedora community could immediately fork off their own and essentially "leave" IBM/RH hanging? Not even sure if that is legally possible now, as the terms of the sale could have potentially included looming/upcoming license changes that might prevent that. I'd say they'd have to act quick and with their general feeling on whether they'd want to go that route (the Fedora community), and I'm sure their w…

There are no legal challenges and there is no hurry. You wouldn't be able to call the fork Fedora but other than that it's absolutely impossible for any shady backroom deal to affect your future ability of forking Fedora. The licensing of the collection as well as the individual components grants you that right and there is no way to take it back retroactively.

With the current state of things, forking Fedora seems unlikely to be a wise decision. RedHat is the major contributor, paying the salaries of many Fedora developers. So far, nothing has changed here with that acquisition.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#709
post #449

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There are periods of concentration and entrepreneurship. Part of the market maturity lifecycle. As a market gets more well established, competitors become less differentiated and start competing on cost which leads to consolidation. This creates openings for upstarts to disrupt or open new markets.

... and yet there is no shortage of examples of ownership being consistently more concentrated over time. Are we are right around the corner from seeing "upstarts" in the television, telecoms, and food manufacturing industries?

Seriously? TV has been totally disrupted by streaming services. Music too. Some industries simply morph into utilities and get stuck in that space forever. Telecom will land there eventually.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#710
post #478

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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 advertisin…

Cognitive Solutions is nominally their AI solutions but actually includes a lot of legacy enterprise stuff put in that basket to make the numbers look better. Wall Street analysts don't dig enough to publicize any of this fiddling.
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