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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#851

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…

> "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together)

Does the physical hardware being on the actual premises or not really have anything to do with "site autonomy" or the granularity of the toolchains?

In fact, can you even buy any viable physical hardware to run on your site that's not already a virtualised "cloud" with the real host OS firmly in the control of your corporate overlords, e.g. Intel ME and AMD PSP?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#852

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…

> "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together) Does the physical hardware being on the actual premises or not really have anything to do with "site autonomy" or the granularity of the toolchains? In fact, can you even buy any viable physical hardware to run on your site that's not already a virtualised "cloud" with the real host OS firmly…

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the cloud is not simply 'server hosting' because, if that was the case we'd still be calling them VPS'.

"The cloud" is a set of APIs for provisioning but also a bunch of managed services that surround your instances, pub/sub, DNS, load balancers, managed SQL. All of this is almost designed to be a vendor lock-in.

However, disregarding the vendor lock-in: How does my OS integrating with AWS's APIs help my on-prem services?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#853

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?…

> The cognitive dissonance is so strong here.

Where? Can you give an example of an expression of cognitive dissonance here?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. They have a bad reputation due to calling open word source software cancer the new windows business model. Also, while their engineers are certainly smart, their software seems very crusty (the down side of infinite backwards compatibility) and usually doesn't play well at all with existing open source software. Thus: Mostly useless.

The early 2000s called and would like their objection back. Microsoft isn't that same company any more and haven't been for a long time. Sure, some of their technology is pretty awful but they definitely changed their tune around OSS.

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#855
post #841
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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.

This happens because the "first job" doesn't pay enough (so doesn't allow for long-term free time), or has hours that are too long to begin with (so doesn't allow for short-term free time).

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#856
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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.

As IBMer you should know there are a plurality of local IBM all over the world, each with local laws and regulations to abide. In Italy all work produced off hours as subordinate is intellectual property of the employer by default unless you sign off a release form for each of them. In Ireland at least they don't want you to touch third party open source code without license vetting because it could inspire you subconsciously and result in copyright infringement.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#857

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…

Come to Sweden then :) As a researcher you explicitly own the rights to any foreground, i.e. results, as stated by law — the so called teacher’s excemption.

If this is indeed true it is a killer argument for moving to sweden.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#858
post #838
post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's a great example. I remember a lengthy thread about this on memo-list back when I was at Red Hat. Always made me smile.

It's also how we were able to spin out our company and raise VC on something inspired by experience, if not using the same code, as what we worked on internally. Having one of the Red Hat founders as our investor helped, but I just loved this attitude of "go build something awesome and keep in touch".

I hope your transition goes well!

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth is Microsoft "absolutely" behind OSS? Which of their main products is Open Source? Windows? Office? SQL Server? Azure? Exchange? What exactly makes Microsoft a company "absolutely behind OSS?" Their stupid boot loader still ignores any other operating system for god's sake. Kudos to people at Microsoft's Marketing and "developer relations" department who won the hearts of developers by allowing TypeScrip…

I work in the public sector in Denmark, and we’ve delt a lot with both IBM and Microsoft over the past 25 years. Microsoft has been one of our best partners, including for the open source software we run, especially since Azure became their mission. IBM has been one of the worst, so bad that I’d dread making any deals with them ever again. I wouldn’t say MS is fully behind OSS though, they contribute a lot these year…

You are likely coloured by being in the one marked where .Net became significant and that’s mostly bacause the only accepted altilernative in Denmark’s monopoly friendly procurement systems were IBM mainframes or Oracle solutions.

Everywhere else RedHat/Jboss won the game and is being replaced by new JWM languages rather then node or .Net though node hides in strange places like the latest SAP framework.

Frontend/native .Net apps are fastly becoming extinct.

MS pretend love for Linux is more an acknowledgement that no one wants dotNET on IIS or anything windows centric in the cloud than any genuine love for Linux so they kind of have to pretend to like Linux workloads and unix tools if they want azure to be more then an niche product.

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