And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative. I'll start. https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu
Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years.
IBM to acquire Confluent
41–50 of 374 posts
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#42Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out? For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.
Gnome has stagnated significantly.
The Gnome desktop that shipped with Solaris over two decades ago is just as useful, possibly more useful, as the tablet-oriented hamburger menu UI of today.
Yes, two decades: https://adtmag.com/articles/2003/08/04/solaris-gets-a-gnome-...
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#43IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have…
IBM is designed to milk every last bit of money from their clients. So they need to add new products every now and then to add new money flows.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#44Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.
I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#45“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.” https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent... I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
Streaming, EDA can solve lot of data challenges for enterprise AI use cases
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#46“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.” https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent... I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
Event-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#47And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative. I'll start. https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu
Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years. https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka
Until Redpanda becomes enshittified.
Sigh.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#48IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have…
Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away all of the customers.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#49And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative. I'll start. https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu
`SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#50This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way? Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic…
I’m pretty convinced there is a bell curve of “understanding what IBM does” where idiots and geniuses both have absolutely no idea.
It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.