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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

#181

Post by Conan_Kudo »

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…

> The only other positive tech that RH owns that I can think of is Ansible. But they didn't create it. They bought it.

Ansible was created within the Fedora Project (owned by RH) as "func" originally. The creators left RH to found AnsibleWorks, which was then acquired by Red Hat in 2015.

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

#182

Post by bonzini »

_delirium wrote: post #151
einpoklum wrote: post #149

IBM now has control over systemd, and as other users here point out, also pulseaudio, dbus, gnome, wayland, and a significant share of kernel. IMHO this is a good time for the Debian project to reconsider the decision to rely on systemd. If you also think so, consider letting them know.

Is there really any likelihood of that happening? If Torvalds got cold feet about systemd and started making it less integral to the upstream kernel (or at least more walled off as an optional subsystem), there's a chance Debian would take that as an opening to move in a non-systemd direction. But as long as the upstream kernel imports more and more systemd-related stuff and treats it as the default/expected configur…

That makes no sense. As long as Linux is concerned, systemd is totally irrelevant: it is not "integrated" in the kernel in any way and cannot even be considered a subsystem.

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

#183

Post by bonzini »

_jal wrote: post #89
bmicklea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat's business model and open culture isn't changing. We will remain independent and I look at this as an opportunity for more people to engage with our stellar support and field teams. For some context you can read the email our CEO sent out to the whole company today: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/jim-whitehurst-email-red-hatt...

Wish you luck, but strongly suggest you remain realistic about how this dance goes, simply for your own sake. Thing is, IBM has been around for a long time and has a long history of acquisitions. They've done it enough that there's a process. My suggestion would be to go through this list and decide which one looks most like the situation in which you find yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_a…

The only one that looks remotely similar is PWC consulting.

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

#184

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

einpoklum wrote: post #149

IBM now has control over systemd, and as other users here point out, also pulseaudio, dbus, gnome, wayland, and a significant share of kernel. IMHO this is a good time for the Debian project to reconsider the decision to rely on systemd. If you also think so, consider letting them know.

Don't be stupid and hysterical, no one wants to use the joke of an OS called Devuan.

systemd is an open source project and it isn't just Red Hat that work on it.

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

#185

Post by ubermonkey »

chr15p wrote: post #138
ubermonkey wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Red Hat's business model and open culture isn't changing. We will remain independent " Oh, man, wouldn't it be pretty to think so? In all seriousness, this is an INSANELY naive statement. It doesn't matter what IBM says, and it matters less what the Red Hat CEO says. You got bought. They can, and will, do whatever they want, regardless of what lip service they pay to independence or preserving culture or whatever.

They've just spent $34billion for what is essentially a culture and a customer base (all the software is open source, and the building are leased), so yes they absolutely can do whatever they want but burning it all to the ground is going to cause some interesting questions about exactly how that increased shareholder value. It could all fall apart but IBM management have a massive incentive to make it work.

No. Individual managers at IBM have strong incentives to meet their own comp plan incentives, and that's it.

Can you point to any acquisition EVER where the acquired company remained "independent" for a meaningful amount of time? Or where the smaller firm retained their own culture? It doesn't happen.

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

#186

Post by SkyMarshal »

babarock wrote: post #175
Zenst wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe it's more of an infrastructure + customer acquisition then. Or maybe it's about eliminating one of the few cloud competitors that IBM is capable of eliminating (not AWS, Azure, GCP).

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

#187

Post by sverige »

babarock wrote: post #175
Zenst wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, there's probably some intimate knowledge of RH's customer base, their needs, their goals, etc., plus whatever processes RH uses to service them. It's not tech, but not all intellectual property is tech.

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

#188

Post by alexeldeib »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #172

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. ?

These aren't really exclusive (although they might be), right?

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

jvagner wrote: post #152
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…

> the move towards FreeBSD Who? Where? for what? You mentioned BeOS. Sorry, I love nostalgia too, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Out in AWS, GCP, Azure, DO -land... it's still going to be Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Windows, etc for a long time.

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by pmarreck »

stirfrykitty wrote: post #176
pmarreck wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

This is a pretty perfect answer to my question, thanks!!
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