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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#841

Post by brazzy »

mcv wrote: post #811
MyNameIsFred wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a terrible and completely unreasonable stance for an employer. You get the hours you pay for. You don't get to own people's free time.

One relatively benign reason behind such policies is that the employer wants your free time to actually be free time that helps your recover, not a second job that leaves you exhausted and fighting burnout and sleep deprivation.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#842

Post by M_Bakhtiari »

MyNameIsFred wrote: post #740
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

> /s

Go back to Reddit, please.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#844

Post by coldtea »

M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #842
MyNameIsFred wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> /s Go back to Reddit, please.

Stop using such cliches to play it holier than thou when it's uncalled for, please.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#845

Post by bipson »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #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…

Your post is mixing arguments with idealism and very specific angles, e.g. on what the cloud is and how it works.

I'm pretty sure RH means something completely different when they talk cloud.

Most of all, I think your post comes down to "RH is bad, systemd is bad, [...] it should die anyway".

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#846

Post by sverhagen »

mcv wrote: post #813
_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…

I totally understand that large organisations don't want to sign papers about things that are none of their business. It's ridiculous that they need to sign them. This shouldn't be a requirement for Open Source contributions. But with some businesses claiming their employees' unrelated work done in their free time, I can see how this has become a necessity. It's harmful for open source, and a terrible situation that'…

Totally agreed.

I always imagined it stems from historical experiences where staff ran off with ideas that they were paid to have within the scope of their employment. So perhaps this is the only way employers have thought of protecting themselves against that. Ie., what other way do we have to offer them?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#847

Post by seqastian »

k_bx wrote: post #837
pookeh wrote: 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?

redhat must also have seen that their ability to grow will rely on a handful of clouds that may or mayn't continue to enable them on their platforms.

.. they probably though the price right now is better than what they would get in 5 years.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#848

Post by CleanShirt »

brazzy wrote: post #841
mcv wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a terrible and completely unreasonable stance for an employer. You get the hours you pay for. You don't get to own people's free time.

One relatively benign reason behind such policies is that the employer wants your free time to actually be free time that helps your recover, not a second job that leaves you exhausted and fighting burnout and sleep deprivation.

That doesnt stand up to reason. There was no enquiry into the amount of hours put into this that would indiciate it was second job or exhausting, they also don't do a full enquiry into any other activities outside your work that might exaust you. That would make contributing to open source a totally arbitrary thing to pick on, which of course it isn't.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#849

Post by johannes1234321 »

mcv wrote: post #811
MyNameIsFred wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a terrible and completely unreasonable stance for an employer. You get the hours you pay for. You don't get to own people's free time.

So when you come up with a solution to a work problem in the shower in the morning or while lying awake in bed in the evening you could sell it to the employer, since you owned that time?

What happens if you create something patentable in the eve information related to your employer's business, maybe even to your project. Can you patent it yourself and then collect royalties from your employer?

What happens if you infringe Copyright on a competitor on your GitHub project, where your GitHub profile also says where you are working, can the competitor distinguish wether it was you personally or as part of work?

For creative work it is tough to fully distinguish between work and leisure time ... some companies deal with this better though, than others.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#850

Post by jlgaddis »

I haven't made it through all of the comments on this thread yet but, in case it hasn't been mentioned, HN'ers who are using AWS may be interested in knowing that, Amazon Linux (i.e., the official Amazon Linux AMIs) also appears to mostly be a clone of RHEL.

I can't be certain as I've just barely played with it but, from first appearances, it sure seemed very similar to RHEL and CentOS!

I don't know if AWS is starting with RHEL and rebuilding everything from source and "re-branding" it like CentOS does or if they're starting with CentOS and then rebuilding and rebranding that -- or perhaps I'm completely incorrect and they aren't doing anything of the sort -- but any future changes or decisions (by IBM/Red Hat) that impact the development or future existence of CentOS could very well affect the future of Amazon Linux as well.

That's certainly something to think about if you use the Amazon Linux distribution, just like I -- and, I imagine, a ton of other CentOS users -- am wondering right now about the future of CentOS.

The good thing is that IBM is old and slow and any decisions that might affect the future existence of CentOS will likely take a few years to actually be realized. By that I mean that I don't think we'll see 7.x affected by this acquisition -- or probably even the first couple of point releases of CentOS 8 -- but, at this point, it's anybody's guess whether 8 will live out its normal/expected lifetime and still be around 10 years after release.

As a side note, recently I've been thinking that an announcement of the release of 8.0 should be arriving any day now. I'm kinda curious if this acquisition has affected (delayed) the release of 8.0 in any way.

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