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IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

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Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#171

Post by pmoriarty »

pstch wrote: post #168
pmoriarty wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the current company's inertia dominates whoever they acquire and the internal sales-driven culture in developed markets supersedes anything resembling engineering related from a company they acquire" What engineering-related innovation has RedHat come up with? As a Linux sysadmin I've noticed that all of the companies I've worked at that have used RedHat chose it not because it was innovative but because: 1 - they c…

The engineering culture is not solely determined by the innovations the company has come up with, so I don't really see the point of the question you ask, with regards to the statement you quoted. When you say that "most of the innovations [...] have been widely seen in the sysadmin community as negative", well, that can only be true in your own sysadmin community. If you replace "innovation" by "contribution", and m…

If the bulk of RH's tech was acquired and did not originate with them then why is their engineering culture even relevant? What engineers work by acquisition? That doesn't sound like engineering to me but business.

Now, if you're talking about the engineering cultures of the companies RH acquired, if RH was able to preserve the engineering cultures of the acquisitions they made, why can't IBM?

Also, if by "engineering culture" you're not actually talking about any innovative products that RH itself came up with, but rather the contributions that RH engineers made to open source projects like gcc or the Linux kernel, IBM has done a lot of that too. I'm not sure why that wouldn't continue under IBM's stewardship of RH.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#172

Post by galaxyLogic »

Is Red Hat's strategy multi-cloud or hybrid cloud? In other words is it easy enough to run your RH cloud-applications at the same time on all of AWS, Azure and GoogleCloud?

Or are they "hybrid" in the sense that you can run your apps both on-premises AND a CHOICE of Azure, AWS etc. ?

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#173

Post by coliveira »

colinmhayes wrote: post #136
coliveira wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But IBM bought RH only because they believed that the company has growth ahead. If it grows a little more than 1% a year (which should be easy) that will be enough to break even. I think that was a smart move by IBM.

You are forgetting about the opportunity cost of $34 billion.

This is money used to buy large corporations, there are no other ways IBM could easily find a loan to spend $34B.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#174

Post by pmarreck »

stirfrykitty wrote: post #140
bitwize wrote: post #132

IBM basically has control of all of Linux now. They've gotta love that sweet, sweet strategic leverage over the entire Web and cloud ecosystem.

There is a lot of truth to this. Since Fedora is the upstream for Red Hat, and IBM historically kill off anything not making a profit, how long before this happens? I wonder if they'll split the two? Red Hat does "control" a disproportionate amount of Linux development. Everything is also now basically dependent on systemd. I'm seeing more and more IT guys I know move over to Free/OpenBSD because they don't like the…

Apologies for hijacking but can someone elucidate the differences between `systemd` and something like apple's open-sourced `launchd` (which I'm more familiar with and which I think is reasonably good)?

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#175

Post by babarock »

Zenst wrote: post #161
roymurdock wrote: post #97

IBM is all in on the multi cloud story since they missed the cloud memo, and RH openshift is their key to allowing customers to lift and shift from AWS to Azure to GCP etc. Plus it's pretty clear they know how to do layoffs and that knowledge may be applied to RH soon to boost profitability.

So more an IP acquisition and IBM sure does know from decades of experience to recognise some company that fills a gap that has usurped their own offerings and acquired it. You may well be right, indeed that was along the lines of my initial thought about this and would explain the size and scale of investment. Then if RH fails as they would currently to keep up those interest payments, then accountants can just rub…

"IP acquisition"? Honest, if all the code that RH writes is open source, how can this be an IP acquisition?

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#176

Post by stirfrykitty »

pmarreck wrote: post #174
stirfrykitty wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of truth to this. Since Fedora is the upstream for Red Hat, and IBM historically kill off anything not making a profit, how long before this happens? I wonder if they'll split the two? Red Hat does "control" a disproportionate amount of Linux development. Everything is also now basically dependent on systemd. I'm seeing more and more IT guys I know move over to Free/OpenBSD because they don't like the…

Apologies for hijacking but can someone elucidate the differences between `systemd` and something like apple's open-sourced `launchd` (which I'm more familiar with and which I think is reasonably good)?

Post #5 in the below link gives you what you seek:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/systemd-vs-launchd.44973/

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#177

Post by Conan_Kudo »

throw0101a wrote: post #156
stirfrykitty wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devuan is but one fork among many. It has zero traction in the enterprise space. Devuan, Gentoo, et al, are niche players. While their userlands may be "pure", they represent a minuscule fraction of Linux users. And yes, systemd is a dependency for quite a few userland programs. Here is one of the best articles I've read on why systemd is really bad. https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/systemd-it-keeps-ge...

systemd-was-init-replacement was not bad. systemd-as-kitchen-sink is where problems started. E.g., creating a binary log file format that is non-ACID, and corruption entails throwing the file away--instead of just leverage SQLite; and then not having a way to send logs remotely, so you have to run rsyslog anyway.

> and then not having a way to send logs remotely, so you have to run rsyslog anyway.

journald has its own remote gateway and can ship logs elsewhere. It's not on by default, but you can easily configure it. There are several addons for plugging in specific protocols and services into the journal.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#178

Post by devonkim »

pmoriarty wrote: post #130
devonkim wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with any M&A is no different than what happens in marriages - do the two blend together, does one dominate the other's culture, etc? The truth is that IBM's history (and to be fair, almost all 10-figure+ market cap tech companies) even with multi-billion dollar acquisitions (that's almost all they do with the exception of Google and Apple I can think off the top of my head) is that the current company's i…

"the current company's inertia dominates whoever they acquire and the internal sales-driven culture in developed markets supersedes anything resembling engineering related from a company they acquire" What engineering-related innovation has RedHat come up with? As a Linux sysadmin I've noticed that all of the companies I've worked at that have used RedHat chose it not because it was innovative but because: 1 - they c…

Perhaps the surface area business value proposition to paying customers is the incorrect place to look for innovation? RedHat has done a tremendous amount for the Linux kernel over decades, and Ansible was basically a RedHat employee project that was made in response to frustrations and spun out and came back into its fold. Also, prior to the advent of yum (RIP Seth Vidal) rpm was all we had. A lot of "innovation" isn't even hardcore low-level engineering as much as standardization and stewardship - none of these things IBM has been known for since the late 80s perhaps. Selinux was also originally an NSA research project that was adopted quickly by RedHat because most of their customers are security-focused (at least on paper).

Not going to disagree that a lot of what RedHat has championed recently has been controversial. What kind of innovation isn't controversial though until usually many years afterward?

Also, cultures can be relative to each other and are not definable in single dimensions. But nobody besides the most Kool Aid soaked of IBMers could say that IBM is more of an engineering-centric culture than RedHat.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#179

Post by pstch »

pmoriarty wrote: post #171
pstch wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineering culture is not solely determined by the innovations the company has come up with, so I don't really see the point of the question you ask, with regards to the statement you quoted. When you say that "most of the innovations [...] have been widely seen in the sysadmin community as negative", well, that can only be true in your own sysadmin community. If you replace "innovation" by "contribution", and m…

If the bulk of RH's tech was acquired and did not originate with them then why is their engineering culture even relevant? What engineers work by acquisition? That doesn't sound like engineering to me but business. Now, if you're talking about the engineering cultures of the companies RH acquired, if RH was able to preserve the engineering cultures of the acquisitions they made, why can't IBM? Also, if by "engineerin…

I feel bad for having inserted myself into this discussion. I think I'm actually agreeing with you here, in that there's nothing that shows that IBM couldn't preserve the culture of its acquisition. I just wanted to comment on what I thought was a statement on their engineering culture.

Personally, I just hope that RH can preserve its engineering culture. I can't say anything on whether it will happen or not, because I don't know.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#180

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

einpoklum wrote: post #146
stirfrykitty wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he was being sarcastic. systemd came from Red Hat employees. It's now effectively everywhere, even in Debian and derivatives. This is not meant to be a systemd sucks rant, but if a distro is using systemd, and most do, they are using Red Hat-developed software, and a most critical piece at that. Gnome, the usual DE for enterprise Linux installs is heavily tied into systemd now. It goes on and on.

It's not in Devuan. With some community effort - that means _you_ - putting pressure on Debian to reverse their decision, it can go out of Debian, easily.

The sun will blow up before Debian reverses their decision.

Did Devuan ever get their build servers back up after they did a childish aprils fools day joke?

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