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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

#241

Post by stirfrykitty »

bluGill wrote: post #212
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…

FreeBSD is looking closely at systemd. While it is agreed it isn't the right solution to the problem, it is also agreed it solves a problem that init scripts cannot solve. Systemd as is will not (for legal reasons) ever be in freebsd, but don't be surprised if FreeBSD writes their own semi-clone that does most of the same things and implements a good part of the interface. I suspect if debian will drop systemd for th…

I like BSD-style init scripts; they are easy to work with and understand. I dislike this trend that systemd started. Pretty soon, everything will be a binary blob. This is one of the reasons I love OpenBSD--no binary blobs. OpenBSD runs great on most laptops with a few issues, but for the most part, I've had great success. It's very stable, easy to learn and use, and more importantly, secure. I want for nothing using it. And I show my age when people see I still run WindowMaker as my preferred DE.

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

#242

Post by rhizome »

johnvanommen wrote: post #231
rhizome wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM basically has control of all of Linux now. Is this really true? It seems to me that a lot of the people who control the direction of Linux might work at RedHat and IBM, but that can change. It has in the past and it will in the future, billion$ acquisitions don't make them immune.

> Is this really true? It seems to me that a lot of the people who control the direction of Linux might work at RedHat and IBM, but that can change. It has in the past and it will in the future, billion$ acquisitions don't make them immune. There's a history of companies simply acquiring the competition: 1) Ansible was written by a former Red Hat employee, and then Red Hat simply acquired his company. 2) Centos was a…

Those are all projects where those organizations control all of the development, aren't they?

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

#243

Post by BrandonM »

jake_morrison wrote: post #23
yitchelle wrote: post #14

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.

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.

That would be hugely ironic considering https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1. Then again, Shuttleworth spoke pretty positively about Microsoft when he closed the bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1/comments/1834

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

#244

Post by bonzini »

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…

systemd was created when Lennart was a Red Hat employee, for the record.

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

#245

Post by kitd »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #227
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…

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…

I just don't see how Red Hat competes with AWS, Azure, and GCP

It doesn't. Their cloud tech, OpenShift, runs on top of the others. Kubernetes can sit on top of that. It makes private clouds portable (kind of).

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

#246

Post by pstch »

bonzini wrote: post #244
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…

systemd was created when Lennart was a Red Hat employee, for the record.

I stand corrected. There is something wrong in Wikipedia, as he's cited as working for Red Hat since 2011, while systemd was created in 2010.

I suppose that nobody could find another source than him saying that he works for Red Hat in a FOSDEM 2011 interview.

If you have such a source, I suggest correcting Wikipedia, as it may induce others in error.

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

#247

Post by rxhernandez »

iamnotacrook wrote: post #18
rxhernandez wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it wasn't Oracle?

All companies will end up sucking in the end, because they're all in it for the money, and you can always make a little more money acting unscrupulously. Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Google - they're all essentially one company, at heart. --- I like the Walrus best," said Alice, "because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters." "He ate more than the Carpenter, though," said Tweedledee. "You see he held his han…

I agree that all profitable companies share similar characteristics and have a similar baseline for malice driven by profit, however, there do exist worse companies. I feel like Blackwater was a much worse company than Oracle will ever be and Oracle is much worse than most of the companies on that list.

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

#248

Post by bonzini »

pstch wrote: post #246
bonzini wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd was created when Lennart was a Red Hat employee, for the record.

I stand corrected. There is something wrong in Wikipedia, as he's cited as working for Red Hat since 2011, while systemd was created in 2010. I suppose that nobody could find another source than him saying that he works for Red Hat in a FOSDEM 2011 interview. If you have such a source, I suggest correcting Wikipedia, as it may induce others in error.

https://lwn.net/Articles/299211/ is from 2008. This is the first pre-systemd source I could find, but PulseAudio became the default in Fedora about a year before so he might have been employed at that time, too.

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

#249

Post by tracker1 »

tontonius wrote: post #84

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…

I think that RedHat itself and the investments in CoreOS and other tech used in OpenStack is a pretty big thing for tethering in IBM. I think it's a better fit than, for contrast, Oracle. I do hope that the RH of old and some of the other bits remain Open Source friendly.

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

#250

Post by KUcxrAVrtI »

bonzini wrote: post #193
vpribish wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or more likely that IBM has been screwing the pooch every which way for the last ~~20~~ 30 years.
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