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IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

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251–260 of 303 posts

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

#251

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 at almost $80hr (Texas), he's making better coin than most programmers here.

Not sure about all programmers but I'm at $200 and I'm underpaid compared to my coworkers. Big telco.

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't bode well for Red Hat over the long term.

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

#253
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

Interesting theory. Based on history and company performance (I don't have sources for this) Rometty's run as CEO has outlasted most expectations. This is definitely an interesting thought

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That doesn't bode well for Red Hat over the long term.

Unless Red Hat cannibalizes IBM from the inside out, and there's some talk that this is exactly what they want. They may be grooming Red Hat's CEO to replace IBM's CEO.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People use systemd because it solves real problems that are not adequately solved by init scripts. Your "want for nothing" says more about your limited needs (which is fine) than anything else about system management services.

Regardless of one's opinions or critiques about the implementation of systemd specifically, the idea that it came up in some kind of vacuum or started a "trend" is utterly ridiculous.

Prior art in UNIX would be SMF at a minimum, and systemd clearly looked at launchd for some inspiration in other areas (systemd ended up having the goal of covering both use cases of launchd and SMF.. ie generally server and desktop).

Also what is this about binary blobs? systemd is configured with text files. Last I checked, the init process itself on BSD is a binary.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the market would find out about that suddenly the day they announce buying Red Hat?

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 at almost $80hr (Texas), he's making better coin than most programmers here. Not sure about all programmers but I'm at $200 and I'm underpaid compared to my coworkers. Big telco.

You're underpaid at $200 an hour?

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

#258
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…

Red Hat employee here, working in the cloud division. I can't speak for IBM, I'm not too familiar with it. I don't know what the future will hold.

So far, Red Hat plays in a field slightly different than AWS/GCP/Azure. Our customers mainly want something _on premise_, something on their machines, their datacenter, behind their firewall. Most of our customers don't want to, or can't, hold their data on machines they don't physically own.

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

#259
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Slight nitpick. OpenShift, since its latest major version (3?) is Kubernetes. It's mostly a repackaging/distribution of k8s. OpenShift can run on top of AWS/Azure/GCP, but also, most importantly, OpenStack.

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

#260

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…

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

They are both in portage should you want them.
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