IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#151

Post by zepearl » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #126

PeterisP wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, reminds me of Oracle.

A common conspiracy theory floated at a previous dayjob was that Oracle does no license checking because you're not going to get far into the operation and maintenance without Oracle DBAs/engineers around anyways. After seeing how clunky some of the tooling is (sqlplus is downright byzantine for no good reason), I have to wonder...

I agree & I add:

- some components of their EPM-software-suite have miserable error/warning/info messages (cryptic, misleading, etc) or even no message at all (making you erroneously think that doing something went well even if it did not).

- opening a "service request" (a support ticket) with Oracle when you have a real technical problem that needs active digging by them is often something that might make you regret having chosen IT as your work area.

Compared to that, once I'm done working and I go back home and start using Linux apps and/or submitting questions&bugs on github/linuxquestions/stackoverflow/etc and getting relatively good replies within minutes I get the feeling that I'm living in the year 3000 :)

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#152

Post by zepearl » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 11:30 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #74

So when IBM is desperate for cash in a few years, who buys Red Hat? Microsoft? Tencent? Dell? gulp Oracle?

What about "Suse"? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE )

I understood that it's often used in corporations as an alternative for RedHat => maybe Suse will have to merge as well with some other company if the combo RedHat&IBM in/directly shrink their revenues?

E.g. maybe Suse will be excluded from IBM's support? ( https://www.suse.com/partners/alliance/ibm/ )

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#153

Post by techntoke » Sun, Aug 11, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

McAtNite wrote: post #146

techntoke wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're much better off learning core Linux utilities like from installing Arch, rather than outdated distro specific management.

Assuming he’s coming from a Windows background learning core Linux utilities on Redhat is also possible. At least going through rhel he can reference the Redhat documentation which tend to be far better written than the million free guides out there. As a real life example, the other day I needed to migrate /var on a Linux box. The freely available CentOs guides covered it well, but when I was done the applications w…

Considering that after RHEL took over CentOS, they are again significantly behind RHEL, and RHEL isn't cost-effective... he could find equal support and probably much more from the Ubuntu community. CentOS or RHEL doesn't even have a public package search, and for good reason. When you find out that they are using an outdated kernel, and outdated qemu/libvirt components, you'll quickly find yourself installing RPMs from a bunch of different locations from Google searches.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#154

Post by skinnymuch » Sun, Aug 11, 2019, 12:12 AM UTC

streetcat1 wrote: post #50

ryukafalz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat does a lot more than just RHEL. They've got a Kubernetes distribution (OpenShift) and a ton of useful software under their umbrella. (Ceph, GlusterFS, FreeIPA, Ansible... etc)

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

Kubernetes isn’t exotic?

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#155

Post by Rapzid » Sun, Aug 11, 2019, 12:22 AM UTC

> On July 9, IBM closed on its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat, a Linux software operating system mainly used by cloud operators.

Completely conflates Red Hat with RHEL and makes it sound like IBM purchased a linux distro for 34b.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#156

Post by mkhalil » Sun, Aug 11, 2019, 12:23 AM UTC

I remember when 3x yearly revenue was the proper purchase price for a an established business like this. 10x huh? Glad, I am not in IBM. But wish the best of luck

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#157

Post by gridlockd » Sun, Aug 11, 2019, 12:23 AM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #9

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…

It's hard for me to see why this dynamic would happen. What specific federal funds rate would make stock prices "supported by fundamentals" rather than "inflated", and why in your view can't the Fed just set that rate to avoid these problems?

> What specific federal funds rate would make stock prices "supported by fundamentals" rather than "inflated", and why in your view can't the Fed just set that rate to avoid these problems?

If I could conceive of a way of calculating the optimal federal funds rate, I'd be owed a nobel prize in both economics and physics. Even then, the Fed probably wouldn't listen to my advice.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#158

Post by JetSpiegel » Sun, Aug 11, 2019, 12:34 AM UTC

ianlevesque wrote: post #117

garmaine wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

CentOS

If RedHat doesn't eat IBM from the inside, it will go down in flames, and take CentOS with it. Without Red Hat, CentOS doesn't seem to have enough community support to keep going (I might be wrong).

It's not even like Ubuntu, where you can quickly jump ship to Debian.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#159

Post by JetSpiegel » Sun, Aug 11, 2019, 12:38 AM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #135

orev wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that those containers eventually need to be hosted somewhere , right? That somewhere is a server running an operating system. Containers are more a threat to virtual machine OSes than ones that host containers.

They are hosted on AWS or GCS on their kubernetes as a service platforms. Of course there is legacy to deal with. And beyond kubernetes you have function as a service.

So, avoiding sharecropping on the FAANG pastures is "Legacy" now?

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#160

Post by mathattack » Sun, Aug 11, 2019, 12:39 AM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #132

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.

The exact same technique is used by Oracle.

Yes. And look at how they operate every company they buy. This will end poorly for everyone at RedHat except their auditors.