IBM acquires Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#731

Post by rodgerd » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

pinewurst wrote: post #707

rodgerd wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm referring to the FS primitives. GPFS presents a POSIX FS, but it's primitive is blocks. Ceph is an object primitive (RADOS) and can present it a number of ways. And Gluster is based around files as primitives, which gives some interesting strengths and weaknesses.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#732

Post by jaimex2 » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:10 AM UTC

Well Canonical - if you were waiting for the right moment to push hard and take Red Hat's business this is it.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#733

Post by davidmr » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:11 AM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #238

So, I have mixed feelings. I don't think in the short term this will be a problem. However IBM has lost it's way. its a very large unwieldy organisation that doesn't change very fast. It also has an awful lot of lifers, who would flounder horribly outside the soft warm IBM shell. But, there are some brilliant engineers and technologies that are inside IBM. The ones I know are about are to do with GPFS, which is a shi…

I definitely agree with you. I’ve been paid more or less to run GPFS over the last 15 years or so (finally free of it for the last few months), and while I hate it with a searing passion, a) it’s far better than the alternatives as long as you can afford it, and b) the people who lead and do the real work on the project are very, very bright. If they keep these people working on hard problems, they’ll do well. If they try to replace them with inexpensive staff, it will fall apart in months.

Parallel POSIX-compliant filesystems at scale are an astonishingly hard problem, and adding the feature set they have while keeping it relatively stable and performant is really worthy of admiration. Every one of the dozens of conversations I’ve had with their developers and technical leads have left me more impressed. They literally can’t test it internally at the scale that their large customers run it, but they’re really good at finding problems and pushing out hotfixes that work pretty well.

That said, if I never have to touch it again for as long as I live, I’ll be a very happy man. From an HPC perspective, I think we’re long past the scale where parallel filesystems should be POSIX-based.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#734

Post by alishan-l » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

Another one bites the dust

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#735

Post by zie » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #349

jacques_chester wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_(file_system) https://openpowerfoundation.org/

What has OpenPOWER actually open sourced? Seems to be more a quid-pro-quo between IBM and its select partners.

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

OpenPower has the entire firmware Apache licensed, see the link. that's WAY more than any Intel/AMD CPU. Even all the secure-boot stuff is open(Apache Licensed).

Joining the OpenPower Foundation is free for https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/how-to-join/

Joining the foundation gets you the chip blueprints, etc.

For hardware it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it. Could they open up more, of course, but for hardware, it's pretty amazingly open.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#736

Post by scooter_de » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:16 AM UTC

meditate wrote: post #704

mohammedbin wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My understanding of WSL is that Linux software runs natively on Windows by virtue of a compatibility layer. Eg. if there is a fork() in my code it will be translated into CreateProcess() or something like that.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#737

Post by mathattack » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:19 AM UTC

As a Corp buyer of both, it seems like one dinosaur buying another. When IBM (Or CA or Oracle or any other old school firm) buys another company, it almost always results in underinvestment in product and worse support.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#738

Post by NegativeK » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #691

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If it's their code by employment contract, they could.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#739

Post by gtirloni » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:25 AM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #393

Aloha wrote: post #59

IBM has been very open source friendly over the last 20 years, more so as of recently.

"IBM further says, "Upon closing of the acquisition, Red Hat will join IBM's Hybrid Cloud team as a distinct unit, preserving the independence and neutrality of Red Hat's open source development heritage and commitment, current product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, and unique development culture. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat's current management team. Jim Whitehurst also will j…

In other words, RH is too big to merge quickly. When it's all said and done (in at most 3 years), expect a new post talking about "increased synergy" where RH will go through major a reorg to be merged into the borg.

This is all very sad.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#740

Post by MyNameIsFred » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 4:31 AM UTC

giis wrote: post #718

I went to IBM(India) interview sometime in 2011, after leaving GlusterFS (Red Hat). Interview went well, during final call with management. I was asked to stop working on Open Source during weekends or off-hours even though the IBM project and my Open Source work has nothing in common. I said, "I thought, IBM support Open Source right?" his response, "Yes, but that's another team" I decided to call-off the interview…

What wouldn't be the 5th time I've heard such stories, but I don't think it's in any way specific to IBM. Employers like that want any OT you do to be dedicated to THEIR endeavor, not somebody else's...even your own.

If you're able and willing to code in your off-time, you should be doing it for the good of the Company. /s