Tomorrow: Microsoft acquires canonical :P
IBM acquires Red Hat
861–870 of 1001 posts
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#862I 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 am currently working for IBM and I'm tied. I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. What I have in contract is - if you want to open a company, you need IBM's permission first.
And it's just frustrating as they try to block it for as long as possibe even if you're not doing IT in your private little business.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#863Earlier quoted context omitted.
I share the sentiment. Gawd. Freaking. Dammit. I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community. Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
>Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019? I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere. Not because of this anyway. There were similar concerns around RH's acquisition (if that's what you call it) of CentOS a couple of years ago, but things have largely been the same. And it's mostly for selfish reasons. The overall dev mindshare of RH based systems has shrunk compared to Ub…
> I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere.
That was the sentiment regarding OpenSolaris when Oracle bought Sun... (And I can't believe no one's mentioned this in 800+ comments so far.)
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#864Guys, this is not just, or mainly not RH Linux. :( - kernel development - Ansible - JBoss (I know HN hates Java, especially Java EE, but it was and is an important factor in enterprise OSS adoption) - OpenShift - Ceph, Gluster All these are in danger, not just RHEL. I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS. Canonical is way behind Red Hat in t…
Red Hat's Open Source only approach does mean that none of these projects can be closed down, though: AFAIK, IBM are acquiring people and a brand, but no significant proprietary IP. If higher-ups at IBM turn out to be as clueless as Oracle, then key engineers will just walk and continue working on those projects elsewhere.
Where elsewhere? The landscape of options to be paid for your OSS has just become a barren field.
Yes, OSS as a concept can survive only on gratis work. However I'm not sure the portfolio of projects supported largely by Red Hat maintainers could. If maintainers are forced to start walking as they did with Oracle I expect to see quite a few projects fall into disrepair.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#865I 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 am currently working for IBM and I'm tied. I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. What I have in contract is - if you want to open a company, you need IBM's permission first. And it's just frustrating as they try to block it for as long as possibe even if you're not doing IT in your private little business.
A long time ago I joined IBM via an acquistion of the company I worked for. One part of the (lengthy) contract I had to sign, was a form listing any side projects I may have that I would be required to no longer work on. I simply omitted that page when I returned the contract and no one ever noticed.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#866Earlier 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's not benign at all - using your "free" time for rest and recovery so that you can be worked to exhaustion during the week.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#867Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in HPC, and, well, it's VERY hard to make a good profit there. - Customers are stingy (think academic labs, supercomputer centers etc.), are not typically married to your solution architecture so for every purchase they will put out a tender that you have to bid for and win. - Performance is king, which means very expensive R&D, and customers don't spend much on all these "enterprise value-adds" that enterpris…
Same here. I'm a HPC admin. We carefully avoid vendor lock-in because it gets too expensive too easily. Performance is king, and we don't buy into the kind of sales bullshit that IBM is famous for. Sadly, we just standardised on CentOS 7 for our new cluster and I am nervous about its future considering IBM involvement now.
The HPC community have forked cantos before(scientific Linux) and make up a big enough fraction of the centos volunteers to do so again.
A big part of the open source appeal is the the vendor who owns the trademark cannot unilaterally kill a product.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#868Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/nat…
In many European countries it mostly boils down to Java vs .NET, depending on the business sector.
And by Java I really mean Java, with alternative languages being done by clever consulting companies, which sometimes I get to rewrite back to Java.
Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#869Re: IBM acquires Red Hat
#870Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am currently working for IBM and I'm tied. I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. What I have in contract is - if you want to open a company, you need IBM's permission first. And it's just frustrating as they try to block it for as long as possibe even if you're not doing IT in your private little business.
A long time ago I joined IBM via an acquistion of the company I worked for. One part of the (lengthy) contract I had to sign, was a form listing any side projects I may have that I would be required to no longer work on. I simply omitted that page when I returned the contract and no one ever noticed.
I'm curious. Anyone care to outline the legal ramifications of this action? What would happen if IBM tried to stop his side-project?
1. Would IBM be able to enforce the original contract as it was outlined when they sent it to him? Would he be liable to fraud or other similar charges (for instance if he altered the contract after IBM representative added their signature)?
2. Or would the altered contract stand up in court?