IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by Xixi » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

johannes1234321 wrote: post #157

Xixi wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bite: NeXT/Apple and Pixar/Disney. I wonder if RedHat management could take over IBM...

Nope they couldn't. Apple acquiring NeXT was to acquire Steve Jobs and making NeXT the foundation of the company. IBM acquiring RedHat is a way to play in the cloud field, not to change the complete IBM Organisation, which is huge.

I'm not entirely convinced Apple really wanted Steve Jobs back. They really needed an operating system after the failure of Copland though.

If IBM shareholders think that the future of IBM is the cloud, and that RedHat is the cloud at IBM, I would not be entirely surprised for Jim Whitehurst to replace Ginni Rometty a couple years down the road... 100% speculation from very very far away (I don't pay for anything from either IBM or RedHat).

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

#192

Post by MikusR » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

jaboutboul wrote: post #26

jake_morrison wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Ubuntu will be bought by Microsoft. With the cloud, especially containers, there is little future in a business that involves paying for operating systems licenses. Most interesting is probably supporting legacy versions of operating systems for customers who value compatibility to be able to continue to run existing applications with the minimum changes.

I sort of agree with this. Either Microsoft will purchase Ubuntu outright from Shuttleworth or they will just create Microsoft Linux, in whatever form that is, probably something more container focused than a general purpose OS.

Microsoft has at least two Linux distributions: Azure Sphere and Azure Cloud Switch. And their own Kernel fork for WSL 2.

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

#193

Post by bonzini » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

vpribish wrote: post #121

sailingparrot wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just from these numbers we can conclude that IBM is seeing some pretty significant synergies in the purchase that the market isn't. Or there was basically very little chance that the acquisition wouldn't go through, and since we have known about it for months, it is already priced in the current stock value of IBM, so today's trading would be mostly unrelated and not representative of what investors think about the…

exactly. the impact from the deal mostly happened at its announcement October 29, 2018 when IBM fell about 5% on the news.

Which in turn can be explained by a decrease in buybacks and/or dividends and thus by lower expected ROI.

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

#194

Post by tareqak » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

A different source with the same news: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/ibm-closes-its-34-billion-ac... .

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

#195

Post by m45t3r » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

stirfrykitty wrote: post #163

jvagner wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's all in what people are willing to tolerate or change. Obviously, the gentlemen over at Haiku feel they have something to offer, as small as it may be. I always though that BeOS was somewhat revolutionary in its approach. I'm still somewhat bothered that Apple let their server offering go. And yes, FreeBSD replaces Linux easily. Not everyone runs their stuff in the cloud. It's not the be-all and end-all. Serious…

> And yes, FreeBSD replaces Linux easily.

No, it doesn’t. Take any non trivial system running Linux and try to run it in FreeBSD. You may get it running in little time, however the number of issues you would have would be big.

Remember that the modern stack have multiple layers of complexity, Linux, your app, SomethingSQL, AnotherThingDb, Kubernetes, AWS/GCE/Azure, etc. Since FreeBSD is not the common choice to run those things you will probably hit a issue here, another issue there, a combination of issue in one layer with another, etc.

Yeah, this may say more about our current systems than anything, however to say that it is easy to substitute Linux with FreeBSD is simply not true.

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

#196

Post by babarock » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #169

rwmj wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source absolutely does make Red Hat money, billions of dollars a year.

Open source doesn't make them that money, servicing open source does.

How will they service open source if they stop funding its development?

I'm assuming that you're implying that's what IBM wants?

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

#197

Post by throw0101a » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #177

throw0101a wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you referring to systemd-journal-remote?

* https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-jou...

I am referring to something syslog-based:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslog#Internet_standard_docum...

which can be used by other tools to process.

Can you point me to documentation on how journald can be configured to send to a remote syslog server?

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

#198

Post by DebtDeflation » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

asdf21 wrote: post #94

duxup wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM has been stumbling around trying to find its feet again for a while now. It seems possible that despite the advantages you cite that IBM won't know how to use them. Word from the inside is that IBM's own "sales machine" selling Watson for what it really wasn't ... was a great deal of the problem with Watson. The skepticism about IBM is rooted in their recent history.

Yeah, whatever happened to Watson? I haven't really heard much in a couple years now..

It's still around, but now it's generally being sold as what it actually is - an NLP framework for building chatbots and search engines - as opposed to magic sentient AGI that can solve any problem.

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

#199

Post by waddlesplash » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

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…

> and something else on the desktop (hurry up, Haiku!).

If you'd like us to hurry up, we could use more hands; software (doubly so clean, well-designed software) does not write itself, especially on shoestring budgets :)

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

#200

Post by gautamdivgi » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

devonkim wrote: post #86

voidfunc wrote: post #27

This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing. RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a number of key technologies. Win-win.

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…

> that's almost all they do with the exception of Google and Apple I can think off the top of my head

I'm not sure how well Google fares either. I mean YouTube is a success story but Boston Dynamics & Motorola are pretty sad outcomes.

With RH and IBM - they were competitors. So, for everything RH does there is an alternative in IBM (operating systems, application software, Java, etc.). Corporate fiefdoms are not so easily dismantled or pacified :)