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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#901
post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This reminds me of that extreme example of altering the contract: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/borrowin...

Very interesting read. However, he changed it before the bank added their signarture. I imagine that if you change the contract after a signature is added by one party, and then add your own signarture, that would surely be fraud... right?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#902

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 startin…

> release of 8.0

"beta of 8.0" is what I meant.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#903
post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IANAL, nut I would say 2. You can alter a contract proposition. It was up to IBM to check what was actually signed.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#904

Earlier 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…

Oh we have JBOSS in our stack, it’s what handles our service bus. I’d rather we didn’t though, it’s really hard to find JBOSS developers/maintainers for public sector pay checks.

We used to see a lot more of it from our suppliers, but it seems to be rapidly going extinct. Possible because there just aren’t a lot of JBOSS developers/maintainers in general.

I am coloured by my environment of course, but I do work in software cooperatives with 97 other muniplacities, as well as a few European communities and I don’t see anything to indicate that .Net, JAVA and PHP won’t remain the dominant techs in Europe for the foreseeable future.

I like node.js, I use it for hobby projects and I genuinely think graphql is a lot better than rest APIs (and there isn’t a graphql adaptation for .Net that isn’t bad), but I just don’t see the adoption anywhere outside of what you hear from American startups.

And again, I didn’t say .Net would rule all web development , I said it would be important, and if the European public sector continues to run on .Net then it’ll continue to be a billion dollar industry.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#905
post #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?

redhat was trading at around $120 last week and IBM announced "Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion."

That $120 was really high for redhat, who just crossed the $100/share price last year. (unless you count year 2000/dotcom-IPO-madness) RHT's market cap was previously $20B.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#906

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.

I wish Cygwin would get more steam, a new package manager and a repository...

You could try MSYS2.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#907
post #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?

Maybe because IBM would have provided a superior price, and RedHat is a public company answerable to shareholders.

Let's take reality, RedHat is still a small player compared to Amazon, Microsoft or Google. They don't have the bandwidth to compete on all the additional hosted services offerings. By partnering with IBM, they get access to IBMs entire suite of enterprise customers and hosted products, making them a serious competitor to the 3 big players instead of being a "me too, cloud". They could make it big together, looking optimistically. But it's on IBM to not screw this up.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> /s Go back to Reddit, please.

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

Radical differentiation from competitors is the name of the game for entrepreneurs. Online communities in general and Hacker News in particular have every reason to push back and reject low-effort Redditisms and 4chanisms.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#909
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…

(OT) I interviewed with IBM after they were acquiring my companies resources at the time. My first two interviews went swimmingly. On my third the interviewer had marked through my last name on my resume and when I asked about it she said she assumed I had spelled it wrong. That was the best thing that happened in the interview.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#910
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people's experience with IBM isn't positive. That does not reflect my or my friends experience. Once one gets beyond the local representatives, service for me always was exceptional.

Maybe for hardware. There are pretty good about hardware support. At two companies I worked at we got people sent to us for on-site repair. Their software support is something else. I haven't had to use IBM tooling in a while, but back when I did, everything they sold was absolutely fucking terrible (DB2, RAD, WebSphere, Clear Case, Tivoli) compared to many open source equivalents. The only reason people buy this rub…

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