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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#831
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…

I'm an IBMer and the current rule is you can work on OS projects in your own time as long as it isn't to the detriment of IBM's projects.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#832

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…

Wait, so your university owns copyright on all your work by default?! That's a bummer if true. Outrageous, actually.

Well, that is the result we got from turning Universities from public knowledge centers into private for profit IP accumulating businesses.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#834
post #831
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…

I'm an IBMer and the current rule is you can work on OS projects in your own time as long as it isn't to the detriment of IBM's projects.

IBM has such a large portfolio that you are probably hard pressed finding an OSS project that doesn't compete with an IBM solution.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#835

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.

Might be going out on a limb here, but maybe that’s why they bought the stock, so they could sell out at a profit?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#836

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.

That's more a Red Hat legal failure than a IBM legal failure.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#837
post #763

Having worked at IBM for 10 years, this is what I have come to know how IBM operates top-down: 1. To make significant profits, we need to sell services on top of our software products (this is essentially GBS and their "strong" sales people) 2. To make very good profits, we need to make highly customizable software (for example AI and BI offerings). 3. To make even more profit we need to make sure the software is tun…

What's not clear here is that why would one company, which is dong pretty well, better every year, would want to be sold to another company, which doesn't look well (from your own description), instead of just continuing growing and eventually "winning" the cloud market by themselves? Is that just because top Red Hat people wanted to cash out more quickly?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#838
post #831
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…

I'm an IBMer and the current rule is you can work on OS projects in your own time as long as it isn't to the detriment of IBM's projects.

Funnily enough, one of the most praised points in Red Hat's code of conduct is the fact that it specifically says that you can work on open source projects _even if it is to the detriment to Red Hat_. Guess that's going to change now.

Disclaimer: Red Hat employee (at the moment)

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#839
Am I the only one cautiously optimistic about this merger? RH has dominated Linux development for too long anyway, pushing systemd, namespaces, procfs and other crap, and making RHEL an overcomplicated jack-of-all-trades O/S which would only run with the specific gcc, glibc, and RH-specific kernel patches and build tools anyway (which is kind of the point of RHEL, and of IBM as well - PTF466735 anyone?). RH now being IBM will make people turn to Debian and derivatives such as Ubuntu and Devuan. The press release on redhat.com talks almost exclusively about "the cloud", but "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together). Why would indie devs and idealists want to contribute their efforts to enslaving people in "the cloud" anyway? "Cloud" stuff is also at odds with user freedom, and only seeks to make software runnable over shitty web frontends for undue profit and privacy invasion, when F/OSS software has been out there in abundance for over a decade. I hope we'll also see some love for the BSDs, and a renewed shared understanding that only POSIX and other standards guarantee long-term autonomy to both individuals and corporations alike.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#840

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…

> GPFS, which is a shining beacon compared to ceph and gluster. Solves an entirely different problem.

Depends on how you use it, and what its for.

_most_ object storage is actually used as a pseudo filesystem (ie S3 et al) because a shared, fast & reliable filesystem are vanishingly rare.

Apart from openstack (and I've never seen a successful deployment of it outside of rackspace) most use cases I've seen involve either bolting on a NFS head, or some other filesystem to ceph and serving it publicly.

which is frankly not all that great. I like the _idea_ of ceph, but I don't want to have to support it. Like Nexenta, it seems great, but it soon hurts during crunch.

What I like about GPFS is that it allows you to join up large amounts of block storage, regardless of the underlying fabric.

Everything has a hook, so if a file has been created/updated/moved/deleted/metadata changed, you can attach a script to that action. There is an inbuilt HSM, which allows you to shuffle files about based on their content: raw footage? move it to the spinny disk array, final deliverables? move it to the storage based in the other country. File bigger than 1TB, and hasn't been touched in two weeks, sure you can kick it out on to tape.

crucially because its all one name space, the end user doesn't have to care about where the file is, the system takes care of that based on rules.

The best part is, there are no special tricks needed for the end program, its just standard file io.

However it is one global system, which is it's downside. for pure uptime its better to have an array of file servers, to limit the blast radius, but then you don't get the goodness

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