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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

#221
post #138

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.

Having worked for a company that got bought out for the "culture and employees", I can tell you that's a lie. You got bought out for the partnerships and technology, and everything else is a bonus. You will fall in line with the IBM culture, or you will be phased out. If you're not a salesperson, I'd suggest you spread your resume around.

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

#223
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Depends on the system. For a desktop enviornment you are correct, *bsd is at best an after thought to pretty much all projects. However "serious" server programs tend to get much more testing on BSD. I don't think you will have any issues running a database on BSD, and probably not a web server (though some web frameworks are Linux first so YMMV)

The biggest problem in "FreeBSD desktop" is not the "FreeBSD" part - that works pretty much fine.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journald.co... Seriously, it's in the man page.

Your man page link confirms the capability is not there. It can forward to local syslog, which is still both useless (logging holes still exist) and needlessly redundant for this purpose.

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

#225

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.

Hobbyists move first. Speaking of nostalgia, I'm sure you remember when people would mention they were moving to Linux and were laughed at — Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and so on were the serious server OSes.

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

#226

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…

As a Gentoo user, I don't see how I'm impacted. What is this systemd or pulseaudio that you speak of? :-)

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

#227
post #161

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…

Almost 80% of IBM's profits come from its cloud division, which is only 27% of it's business.

It seems like the idea behind the Red Hat acquisition would be to increase the cloud division revenue and keep roughly the same profit margin, which in theory could be great for their bottom line, especially if Red Hat is growing quickly (is it?).

The arm chair CEO in me doesn't see how this adds up, though. Red Hat seems pretty pricey. I just don't see how Red Hat competes with AWS, Azure, and GCP moving forward, and I don't really see how it plays nicely / fits into those clouds either. I also don't see how it would make IBM's cloud more attractive. I can see how it could make IBM's cloud more profitable, but it seems like a stretch, given what they paid for Red Hat.

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

#228

So IBM buys Red Hat for $34B, of which $20B are borrowed monies. The debt is priced at 1.05 percentage points above Treasury yield rate [1] which would be somewhere around 3.5% which puts interest on bond debt at ~$700m every year. Now consider that Red Hat had a net income of $433m. Even if they reach $500 this year, Big Blue will still be $200m short, every year. At the moment, IBM is trading down at -0.5% on an ot…

Red Hat control and discretion and non-revenue generating properties now belong to IBM.

The purchase multiple is pretty crazy, and I like that I can point to a multiple that high when suitors want to buy into my own tech companies.

But for IBM this is a net win. Paying all that interest is basically a rounding error and means they barely spent any money for decades if they so choose.

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

#229

Does this acquisition open up the market for a Linux company to move into the Linux enterprise space? Maybe Ubuntu could pivot into this space.

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...

Oh honey... You may get 2-3 good years, but IBM VPs will swarm in and try to kingdom build -- its only a matter of time.

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

#230
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…

Almost 80% of IBM's profits come from its cloud division, which is only 27% of it's business. It seems like the idea behind the Red Hat acquisition would be to increase the cloud division revenue and keep roughly the same profit margin, which in theory could be great for their bottom line, especially if Red Hat is growing quickly (is it?). The arm chair CEO in me doesn't see how this adds up, though. Red Hat seems pr…

So kubernetes turn the clouds into a commodity. And this is Red hat play. The issue here is that google (kubernetes creator) is afraid to compete with itself (aka GCP), and hence needs another player to complete the picture.
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