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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#891

Post by ptero »

SpaceInvader wrote: post #862
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…

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.

> I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue.

I am pretty sure this is the standard practice at all large companies, at least in the US. Small companies may just not care too much, but even at a small company if your management notices you might have to choose between that and your day coding. I wish it was not like this, but to me this is at least somewhat justifiable.

Much worse is the desire of most employers to control everything you do, including your work on open source project off hours. Want to fix coordinate computation for an open source satellite sim? Call the lawyers first. Lead a robotics club at a high school? Check with the management. IMO many employees do it anyway and hope to not get called on this, but this is formally going against the contract.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#893

Post by M_Bakhtiari »

dijit wrote: post #852
M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> "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.

A lot of it is, but I strongly disagree that all of it is. Many of these are perfectly interchangeable with the exact same software (FOSS DBMS, web server, load balancer, etc.) running on a competitor's managed service, VPS or on your own premises. As for the services that aren't, I do think the IT architects and managers who agree to use them are absolutely crazy and ought to be fired. If all of them are fired, cloud providers would be forced to provide interoperable provisioning APIs and services or perish.

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

I suppose it doesn't, but why should it? If you think they bloat up your local installation, maybe you can just not install the kernel modules/daemons/libraries in question.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#894

Post by XorNot »

p1necone wrote: post #696
qwerty456127 wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if IBM decided that they had copyright on your contributions to Cygwin. How could they decide this if you'd have written the code on a weekend?

Many employers have clauses about owning any IP you produce while employed there, regardless of whether or not it involved company time or property. Whether said clauses are actually enforceable varies from location to location.

Aka "justice by bank balance and time".

At some point software engineering is going to have a union just as a legal defence fund.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#895

Post by rapsey »

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?

Because IBM vastly overpayed and there will not be another opportunity like that any time soon.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#896

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#897

Post by PeterStuer »

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.

More the opposite. Your contract says 8 hours, but everyone does 11 on average, so there is no way you could dispute ownership of those results.

Secondly most IT companies have 'innovation participation' programs that want to have first dibs on all your creative ideas, whether it's on the clock or off.

Thirdly, in an industry with very low start-up costs (all you need is a computer)and high competition for talent, even the potential threat of a former employer claiming IP over your new business can be a potential deterrent that nudges people into just not do it.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#898

Post by phkahler »

xorcist wrote: post #519
phkahler wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So with RedHat and the remains of IBMs hardware division, they make a push into the cloud with their own RISC-V servers with chips fabbed on an advanced node and with a full software stack driven by both IBM and RedHat developers. They'd be vertical in their cloud offerings. You don't need to tell me I'm hallucinating - I know. But it's fun to imagine something good coming from this rather than the simple destruction…

Why would they drop OpenPOWER for RISC-V?

>> Why would they drop OpenPOWER for RISC-V?

IBM is member of the RISC-V foundation. If they could make a similar high performance server chip with RISC-V ISA I'd take that over OpenPOWER any day due to the much wider acceptance of it. They could also support both and see which goes further.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#899

Post by [deleted] »

ptero wrote: post #891
SpaceInvader wrote: post #862

Earlier 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.

> I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue. I am pretty sure this is the standard practice at all large companies, at least in the US. Small companies may just not care too much, but even at a small company if your management notices you might have to choose between that and your day coding. I wish it was not like this, but to me this is at least somewhat justifiable. Much worse is the desire of…

[deleted]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#900

Post by easytiger »

ric2b wrote: post #881
coderjoe wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess they can start a new company and keep working on the same products. The community would have to change to their new repo's but other than that RedHat could get a new start, with a different name.

CENTOS?
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