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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

#131

Post by guan »

criddell wrote: post #119
mrep wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, remember, share buybacks are just a more tax efficient form of returning profits to investors than dividends. As they buy more and more of their stock, the remaining shareholders end up owning a larger and larger percentage share of the company. Taken to the extreme, there would finally be 1 share left held by someone and thus that person would own 100% of the company and be entitled to 100% of the profits from…

> The company cannot cannot just buy the last stock because the stock itself is worth all the cash the company holds and the future profits it will make. The last share is worth whatever the person that holds it is willing to sell it for, right? A share of IBM is worth $136 right now because there are two parties willing to buy/sell a share of IBM at that price. I realize this would never happen in a million years, b…

It would cause some practical difficulties if the corporation owned all its shares. For example, in the case of a Delaware corporation, shares owned by the corporation itself can’t vote, so it would not be possible to elect board members. Some jurisdictions might have legal limits on how much stock can be bought back as a percentage of the outstanding shares.

It’s not that unusual to have entities that essentially own themselves, in the sense that nobody is entitled to the profits and the board or managers elect their own successors. This is the case for foundations and trusts in many countries, usually with some kind of charitable purpose. Some of them even operate businesses. It might be possible for a company to take on some debt, buy out all its shareholders, and reorganize into a charity.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#132

Post by bhouston »

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.

The exact same technique is used by Oracle.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#133

Post by H8crilA »

downrightmike wrote: post #125
H8crilA wrote: post #98

PSA: If you want exposure in your portfolio to the M&A market there's an ETF that does it: https://www.etf.com/MNA It's perhaps the single biggest "alternative" strategy ETF.

YTD isn't even 1%, almost anything else has done better.

It's an alternative strategy, meaning it tries to be decorrelated with anything else. It may be useful if you want a balanced portfolio, not just a 100% stocks bomb.

Historical yield is not everything. Things change, past performance is not necessarily a predictor of future success.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#134

Post by jjeaff »

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.

I have some employees in India and apparently, Adobe does this there. They will just randomly show up and ask to look at all your systems and see if you are using pirated Adobe products.

I have no idea what the laws are there, but the companies they show up at don't even necessarily have any license with Adobe. I can't imagine that is legal in India, but apparently it happens unabetted.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#135

Post by bhouston »

orev wrote: post #18
streetcat1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing to drag. A single server distro is becoming irrelevant as the unit of computation resources is the kubernetes cluster. I.e. all the app see is a set of kubernetes nodes, it does not really care what server disto you are running on.

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.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#136

Post by windexh8er »

sangnoir wrote: post #127
windexh8er wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Keep in mind the people using the products in a large enterprise are not, generally, the people who have to pay for it. If you break these two people into their respective, high level, org groups it will generally be: procurement and engineering. IMO it's not that the engineering group is trying to not be trustworthy. It's that they have a job to do and IBM knows that this is their goal. So if we let eng…

> The disconnect here is that had IBM enforced hard license limits the organization may say that the product is too expensive and look for an alternative because the customer is forced to buy more licensing mid-budget cycle. Also, things can go wrong with automated license enforcement, and at large enterprise scale, that would be costly to the customer (and therefore IBM as they'd be summarily replaced). I can alread…

Most enterprise products today have a grace period when they enforce licensing (soft vs hard). So if a licensing server is unavailable it will start into a countdown mode of days, weeks etc before the product changes it's state for this exact reason. On the flip side most licensing servers will alert when check-ins go offline for two, general, situations: operational product that become isolated (your example) or decommissioned environments.

I don't know of any large scale products that don't approach it like this today simply because the vendor doesn't want to be responsible. I'm sure some smaller products might do this, that is until they lose a customer over one of those bad situations where a customer is trying to renew a contract and they get cut off before the PO clears the backend on the vendor side.

But agreed, automated licensing does have it's fair share of pitfalls. Then again, it's like taxes. You should know, at any point in time, where you stand over the course of a year as it pertains to your over/under. The old school manual audits seem to be kept in place to keep the overages out of sight.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#138

Post by heroprotagonist »

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.

OpenShift is pretty well positioned as the Kubernetes variant for big enterprise, with the often-necessary vendor support and responsibility that simply doesn't come with open source. Cloud vendor implementations can take away some of the risk there, but there are a ton of servers still sitting in datacenters still.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#140

Post by beagle3 »

streetcat1 wrote: post #48
beagle3 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same mindset would dictate that you only ever buy no-name hardware which is about 30% cheaper than dell/hp for the same performance characteristics... why would anyone do that? And that's why people DO pay for red-hat. Peace of mind, whether supported by evidence or not.

So people pay for redhat because they did not move to container/ microservices architecture. Any main stream technology (Mainframe, Dec/Vax, PC, VM) will always have legacy customers. However, one the state of the art architecture is micro services, the optimal runtime is kuberentes. Once everyone is on kubernetes hardware will not matter. Moreover, I would love a cloud based on second hand hardware (which should be…

What is the hypervisor OS? RedHat certifies hardware so you know your disk controllers and hot-swappable memory and CPU are supported.

You CAN use Alpine as the hypervisor, but IBM/RedHat/Oracle customers typically don't.

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