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IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

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Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#81

Post by streetcat1 »

Spivak wrote: post #72
streetcat1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all of those are quite exotic, and thus risky / expensive to support.

None of those are exotic if you're running on-prem/colo'd workloads. They might be exotic to app develoers but for anyone in operations they're your staple tools. They're the tools used by the people backing your Kube cluster :P IPA/IdM is the gold standard for user management on a fleet of servers. Gluster is the best replicated filesystem hands down and Ceph is the only alternative to expensive SANs that scales wel…

I agree, My point here is that I see the acquisition as a result of the market shift that is happening due to the introduction of Kubernetes. And in this case, it was the result of openshift.

Note that once you use containers, you decouple your infra tools from the app dev tool.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#82

Post by b_tterc_p »

josh_fyi wrote: post #76
riffraff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my ignorance,but what is an IBM auditor?

IBM products have no license-checking built in, on purpose. They want you to make more copies than your negotiated license agreement allows. Then, when the auditor comes in, they charge you the sky-high list price, backdating it as well.

What if... you don’t let them inside?

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#83

Post by freehunter »

garmaine wrote: post #71
sharpneli wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ibmaudits.com/ibm_faq/ Read and despair. tl;dr: They dig around to see you’re paying the correct license fees. They’re common and expensive enough that law firms offer special counseling explicitly for that.

Wtf. Ok thanks for posting. I will never use any RedHat product ever again.

The alternative is paying for the software you're using. If you don't want to pay for for-pay software, there's plenty of no-cost Linux distros available.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#84

Post by o-__-o »

goatinaboat wrote: post #38
o-__-o wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why run a full os for container runtime? Wouldn’t a hypervisor be more efficient? What is the point of red hat at that point

Doesn’t Red Hat own CoreOS?

Oh red hat is the only player in town that can do that? Now you know why IBM bought them!

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#85

Post by thomasjames »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #44
broknbottle wrote: post #17

IBM missed a great marketing opportunity. They should have told the public that the decision to acquire Red Hat was made by Watson

I'm not sure if you're joking, but if you aren't that would be a pretty big risk. If it doesn't pay off they would look pretty bad for Watson

Isn't Watson already a tired marketing device whose existence as a meaningful product/system is debatable? Not sure how much more damage would be done.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#86

Post by gridlockd »

lbotos wrote: post #21
gridlockd wrote: post #5

What laypeople need to realize is the following relation: Low federal funds rates allow companies to acquire huge amounts of debt very cheaply. Huge amounts of cheap debt allow companies to buy lots of stock, driving up prices. Stock prices inflated in such a way are not supported by fundamentals and so the downside risk greatly increases. Once the downside eventually materializes, markets drop violently. At first, t…

I, lay person here, to see if I get it: > Huge amounts of cheap debt allow companies to buy lots of stock, driving up prices. > Stock prices inflated in such a way are not supported by fundamentals and so the downside risk greatly increases. The price is driven up by "demand" but the demand is not "real" because it wasn't due to the business actually _innovating_ but actually just "stock changing hands"? > Once the d…

> The price is driven up by "demand" but the demand is not "real" because it wasn't due to the business actually _innovating_ but actually just "stock changing hands"?

The demand is real, but the fundamentals do not support it. Fundamentals include things like price vs. earnings or debt vs. assets, dividend yields, etc.

If you like at this graph of price vs. earnings, you can can see dramatic rises relating to stock market bubbles:

https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe

> When/how does that happen?

It has already happened and we're in the middle of it. When the markets tanked in late 2018, the Fed stopped hiking. When the markets tanked again in May, the Fed announced a rate cut. Now that the rate cut is in place, the markets are tanking again, perhaps because a bigger rate cut was priced in. We'll see what happens in the coming months.

> There is no way for it to "not" right? It's sort of like measuring volume of action, but the action didn't actually produce any real "value"?

I guess that's a fair way of looking at it.

> Is there a better measure that _does_ reflect it?

Of course there are indicators that you can use to show that this kind of inflation is taking place, like the S&P 500 PE ratio I showed earlier, or rent income vs. property prices.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#87

Post by unimployed »

cat199 wrote: post #61
unimployed wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a mix of globalization, technological financialization, and perverse incentives. The markets have become increasingly global to the point that there is never a shortage of investors or investment capital. However, profitable, low or no risk investment opportunities do not grow on trees nearly as plentifully. Due to an overabundant supply of investors with a high demand to seek profitable low or no risk invest…

> Due to an overabundant supply of investors with a high demand to seek profitable low or no risk investment opportunities to park their wealth for growth via interest, and a much lower supply of profitable low or no risk investment opportunities—the interest rates to park your wealth must fall. Or, lowering interest rates creates overabundant demand for low/no risk investment opportunities... while I agree with your…

It’s what seems to make sense.

Lower relative interest rates creating the overabundant demand doesn’t seem to carry as much explanatory power when you consider that interest rates were also relatively lower before the hyper-inflationary period. What changed is not just the interest rates being lower. True lower rates have some effect, it’s just not enough when you consider that the investments will also be lower growth.

Supply side economics has a hand to play here, already mentioned in deregulation, lobbying by corporate interests, decreasing tax-rates on corporations and the wealthy, financial sophistication and technology of said parties to avoid taxation and capture more of the economic progress. I guess the issue is with supply side... that it is very much USA centrist and is not entirely explanatory globally. The USA does have the world’s reserve currency though. But take Japan for instance, it started the trend of low interest rates and QE forever because of globalization issues with currencies and economies, not supply side economics.

I think supply side movement isn’t really incompatible with my explanation and it actually fits inside it instead of my explanation fitting inside supply side changes. I think it is helpful to remember that the neoliberal economic and libertarian agendas are responsible for all of this in any event.

Income inequality is another issue... economic progress for the laborers being incremental at best while the progress of capital owners has been explosive. There is a tie-in possibly, that the income share of labor is being hallowed (or crowded) out by capital. That the economy is making laborer and consumer activity highly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The economy is more concerned now about retaining capital that be can pulled out en mass on a whim and major investments can be postponed on an indefinite basis for years until the conditions are capital-perfect again.

The relevance of consumption is diminishing and laborers and consumers are increasingly living in an economy that is not concerned with balancing the affordability of housing and education and health care with how the rest of the economy is performing... especially the items that are rather inelastic and you require to live or progress.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#88

Post by cronix »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #82
josh_fyi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM products have no license-checking built in, on purpose. They want you to make more copies than your negotiated license agreement allows. Then, when the auditor comes in, they charge you the sky-high list price, backdating it as well.

What if... you don’t let them inside?

Most likely they'd be violating their contract.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#89

Post by buttcoinslol »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #82
josh_fyi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM products have no license-checking built in, on purpose. They want you to make more copies than your negotiated license agreement allows. Then, when the auditor comes in, they charge you the sky-high list price, backdating it as well.

What if... you don’t let them inside?

IBM would take you to court for breach of contract.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#90

Post by kgwgk »

mathattack wrote: post #65
kgwgk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late shareholders didn’t lose anything. (Assuming you mean RedHat’s shareholders, because if you mean IBM’s then the reference to customers and employees makes less sense.)

I mean anyone still holding post-merger.

I see. For the time being the IBM stock is holding well. In the long term it may be hard to see if the acquisition was a good idea or not (given that the outlook for IBM alone was not so bright anyway) but I think I share your skeptiscism.
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