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

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

#261

Post by muricula » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:48 PM UTC

anticensor wrote: post #233

muricula wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello from Redmond. It's all good old NT under the hood. NT is in Azure, XBox, anything which MS builds really. What is interesting is that Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 will actually run a Linux kernel in a VM. I guess implementing a syscall emulation layer for all of Linux was too much, but they still did a very impressive job.

WSL 1 allows for more security. What they should have done was map WSL users 1:1 to Windows users (Wine users work like that). setuid(), seteuid() and/or capability elevations would raise an UAC prompt as if they were called from Windows .

UAC is not a security boundary, unfortunately :(

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

#262

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

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.

> Maybe Ubuntu could pivot into this space.

Canonical is already in that market and has been for a long time. I work for Pivotal, we have a contract which gives us all-the-gold support for Ubuntu, because that's what we're shipping to our customers.

Disclosure: Pivotal competes with Red Hat/IBM in the cloud platform market.

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

#263

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:54 PM UTC

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. ?

The answer is "it depends". Their main offering in this space is OpenShift versions 3 and 4. They have different underlying management planes. v3 is on a bunch of different clouds, v4 is still catching up but probably will within the next 12 months or so.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, a competitor in the same space (most directly through PKS).

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

#264

Post by sumoboy » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 10:54 PM UTC

Mindwipe wrote: post #92

raesene9 wrote: post #33

I don't doubt the committment of RH to Open source, but looking at IBMs rather chequered history with regards to how they look to minimize costs, there must be some concern that next time there's a bad set of results, executive management will be looking for cost savings. There are plenty of examples https://www.thelayoff.com/international-business-machines specific example related to RH https://www.thelayoff.com/t/Z…

As the very good comment above points out, IBM will need to cut costs very significantly regardless, as they've paid so much the interest on the debt is more than Red Hat makes.

I give IBM two quarters before they start layoffs regardless how RH performs.

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

#265

Post by ethbro » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

streetcat1 wrote: post #230

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #227

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…

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.

Based on market share, Google has undoubtedly run the numbers and realized that increasing cloud portability hurts Amazon and Microsoft more than it hurts Google.

From that perspective, community adoption of k8 benefits Google.

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

#266

Post by BeetleB » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 11:07 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #260

BeetleB wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The key point is that they are not on by default, and AFAIK, Gentoo has committed to make everything work without them. An average Gentoo user would never have heard of systemd.

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

#267

Post by streetcat1 » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #265

streetcat1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Based on market share, Google has undoubtedly run the numbers and realized that increasing cloud portability hurts Amazon and Microsoft more than it hurts Google. From that perspective, community adoption of k8 benefits Google.

This is correct, however, kubernetes is a platform of platforms. I.e. it will hurt all of them at the end.

Kubernetes is realy a free, uncontrollable , widely installed (on prem and cloud) infrastructure, that compete directly with the clouds. Think of the iphone app store, without any apps (yet), and not controlled by apple.

The reason that companies pays for cloud services (which are 20x the real cost of hardware) is to off load the human cost in managing their infrastructure, and to get hold of cloud native infrastructure (I.e. infra as code, fully scalable).

However, with kubernetes you can create your own automatic robots (aka operator) which would replace the costly admins by taking care of application management. And at the same time you architect to a portable API layer.

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

#268

Post by opportune » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 11:52 PM UTC

rusticpenn wrote: post #53

ilovecaching wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are horrified because IBM is a sinking ship and a monolithic big business that will attempt to look at everything from a fiscal perspective with no real love for what made Redhat great. Is IBM really going to give Systemd, Fedora, the full time kernel maintainers a break and pay them to make “unprofitable” software? We’re also seeing the end of independence that was making the open source model work with digni…

IBM spends so much on R&D. I am not sure if the company is solely focussed on short term profits.

"R&D" is a bit of a misnomer in the software world. Lots of things are technically R&D that you wouldn't think of as R&D

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

#269

Post by LeoPanthera » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 1:20 AM UTC

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.

Aren't all those things GPL?

Can they not be forked in the case of a sudden change of direction that Debian, or anyone else disagrees with?

What do you mean by "control"?

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

#270

Post by dang » Wed, Jul 10, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #184

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.

Comments like your first sentence here (and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20381009) are bannable offences on HN. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart when posting here? We'd be grateful.