IBM acquires Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#971

Post by balabaster » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #966

balabaster wrote: post #958

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it. I've routinely done this with every contract I've ever signed. Nothing gets signed without legal scrutiny on my part and it never will; and I've quite literally never had a potential client or employer balk at…

>People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it. How do people do this these days? Virtually everything I sign these days from my employment contract to my lease to the vast majority of the paperwork for my mortgage was all signed electronically. There's no…

You don't get coerced into signing for something electronically for a start. If this is the only way they allow to do this and don't allow for you to amend sections, you tell them that you will print it, have your lawyer amend it and then fax it back.

If they want your business, they will make concessions to win that business.

If they don't allow for this, then you need to be the one to decide if you still want to do business with them. I sure wouldn't. I'm not signing for anything that gives away my rights.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#972

Post by anticensor » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

mangecoeur wrote: post #861

Tomorrow: Microsoft acquires canonical :P

The week after: Ubuntu LTS ditched, Ubuntu gets forced updates; https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows returns 200 OK, containing Windows 10 source code :)

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#973

Post by SuperSandro2000 » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

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 would have done the same.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#974

Post by equalunique » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

TylerJewell wrote: post #398

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS. Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they're not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.

WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.

Nice to see WSO2 represented here!

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#975

Post by bubblethink » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:56 PM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #863

bubblethink wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.)

OpenSolaris came after regular Solaris. It was a retroactive opening of code, and wasn't as essential to regular Solaris. In contrast, Fedora is quite instrumental to RHEL's existence. CentOS is not that instrumental, but it's not a major cost sink either. It used to be community driven earlier and can become so again. i.e., Unless they go out of their way to do something malicious, which would have little payoff anyway.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#976

Post by oso2k » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

ndru wrote: post #838

kitd wrote: 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)

(Also a Red Hatter)

So...not completely true. There was that one memo-list thread last year where someone complained loudly that they were not allowed to work on an intentionally competing solution and repo, even if it was on their own time.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#977

Post by paulie_a » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 8:16 PM UTC

jhallenworld wrote: post #614

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.

Honestly I probably would have just scribbled a name in a terrible hand writing (not hard for me anyways) and called it a day. They just wanted something on file that would never be looked at again.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#978

Post by paulie_a » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 8:23 PM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #966

balabaster wrote: post #958

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it. I've routinely done this with every contract I've ever signed. Nothing gets signed without legal scrutiny on my part and it never will; and I've quite literally never had a potential client or employer balk at…

>People are aware that they're not required to sign any contract they're not happy with, right? You are well within your rights to cross through any section of a contract or amend it until you're happy with it. How do people do this these days? Virtually everything I sign these days from my employment contract to my lease to the vast majority of the paperwork for my mortgage was all signed electronically. There's no…

I generally refuse to sign edocuments, I'll print it and mail it. I might email scanned signed copies. But I have enough experience to know DocuSign sucks. I have zero faith in it.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#979

Post by SwellJoe » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 8:39 PM UTC

jake_morrison wrote: post #915

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to be a huge SoftLayer customer. Then they got bought by IBM and service/pricing/network/everything got worse. Then we left. IBM sucks.

We were a Softlayer customer for dedicated servers before the acquisition. Afterwards, we needed to add additional servers, and IBM wanted 50% more for the same config, already quite high (twice as much as we pay elsewhere). When we needed to increase the RAM from 16GB to 32GB, they wanted $50/month for a stick of RAM that costs about $100. It's like they are using cloud pricing as a reference for dedicated servers.…

"then downloading a Java applet with a very specific (obsolete) version of Java. The applet didn't support copy and paste, and frequently repeated keys"

Ah, yes, Lantronix Spider. My current colo still uses that old bastard. It's the only reason I still have Java on one of my laptops. And, now that our colocated servers are getting old and crotchety, I'm beginning to think it's not worth it and considering moving out to some cloud-based thing (but to keep costs down we'd need to reimplement a lot of stuff, because "big box with a bunch of services running" is outrageously expensive on the major cloud-based virtual machines, compared to ~$100/month to stick a fat server in a rack and get a gigabit pipe plugged into it).

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#980

Post by davanumsrinivas » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 8:44 PM UTC

TylerJewell wrote: post #398

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS. Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they're not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.

WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.

Congrats!