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IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

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

#151

Post by _delirium »

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.

Is there really any likelihood of that happening? If Torvalds got cold feet about systemd and started making it less integral to the upstream kernel (or at least more walled off as an optional subsystem), there's a chance Debian would take that as an opening to move in a non-systemd direction. But as long as the upstream kernel imports more and more systemd-related stuff and treats it as the default/expected configuration, and then things like desktop environments follow suit and depend on it, Debian would need to maintain what amounts more and more to its own fork of the rest of the Linux world to do otherwise. When this was last discussed, most Debian developers didn't think it had the dev resources to do that.

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

#152

Post by jvagner »

stirfrykitty wrote: post #140
bitwize wrote: post #132

IBM basically has control of all of Linux now. They've gotta love that sweet, sweet strategic leverage over the entire Web and cloud ecosystem.

There is a lot of truth to this. Since Fedora is the upstream for Red Hat, and IBM historically kill off anything not making a profit, how long before this happens? I wonder if they'll split the two? Red Hat does "control" a disproportionate amount of Linux development. Everything is also now basically dependent on systemd. I'm seeing more and more IT guys I know move over to Free/OpenBSD because they don't like the…

> the move towards FreeBSD

Who? Where? for what?

You mentioned BeOS. Sorry, I love nostalgia too, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Out in AWS, GCP, Azure, DO -land... it's still going to be Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Windows, etc for a long time.

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

#153

Post by kortilla »

fny wrote: post #63
rusticpenn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IBM spends a fraction of what other household names spend. > That’s according to an analysis by Recode, which found the e-commerce giant [Amazon] spent nearly $23 billion on R&D in 2017. Technology companies rounded out the top five, collectively spending $76 billion on R&D last year. The other tech companies that spent the most on R&D were Alphabet (GOOG), Intel Corp. (INTC), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (A…

So half of what Apple spent? That’s hardly damning.

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

#154

Post by kortilla »

marcosdumay wrote: post #126
infraCode wrote: post #113

i'm just a lurker and i have a lot of respects for this community but why some of you acting like somehow RedHat is not going to make money anymore after IBM bought them. RedHat already make billion doing what they do now. Why would that change? IBM is basically a consulting company and adding RedHat is more than a perfect match since RedHat main business is selling supports. this thread just wow.

Both companies have very different, even incompatible cultures. And it's not part of IBM culture to buy a company and not integrate it. Specially, IBM is used to much fatter margins than RH's market allows.

IBM does not integrate companies beyond putting their logo on stuff. Look at the weather company and Softlayer.

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

#155

Post by pmarreck »

stirfrykitty wrote: post #140
bitwize wrote: post #132

IBM basically has control of all of Linux now. They've gotta love that sweet, sweet strategic leverage over the entire Web and cloud ecosystem.

There is a lot of truth to this. Since Fedora is the upstream for Red Hat, and IBM historically kill off anything not making a profit, how long before this happens? I wonder if they'll split the two? Red Hat does "control" a disproportionate amount of Linux development. Everything is also now basically dependent on systemd. I'm seeing more and more IT guys I know move over to Free/OpenBSD because they don't like the…

Not sure if related, but I do note that Amazon EC2 now has an Ubuntu stack option for their lowest tiers instead of their default, weird, not-always-well-supported fork of RHEL that they've been using since inception.

I believe this offering appeared in April.

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

#156

Post by throw0101a »

stirfrykitty wrote: post #150
einpoklum wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The userland is absolutely not dependent on systemd _at all_. Have a look at Devuan, and you'll see that almost all of the userland remains exactly the same. See: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/433159/34868

Devuan is but one fork among many. It has zero traction in the enterprise space. Devuan, Gentoo, et al, are niche players. While their userlands may be "pure", they represent a minuscule fraction of Linux users. And yes, systemd is a dependency for quite a few userland programs. Here is one of the best articles I've read on why systemd is really bad. https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/systemd-it-keeps-ge...

systemd-was-init-replacement was not bad. systemd-as-kitchen-sink is where problems started. E.g., creating a binary log file format that is non-ACID, and corruption entails throwing the file away--instead of just leverage SQLite; and then not having a way to send logs remotely, so you have to run rsyslog anyway.

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

#157

Post by johannes1234321 »

Xixi wrote: post #144
jackhack wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually put it this way: "Name one company that was better after a merger." I've yet to find any affirmative answer. It's good to have hope, but it's not good to be unrealistic.

I bite: NeXT/Apple and Pixar/Disney. I wonder if RedHat management could take over IBM...

Nope they couldn't. Apple acquiring NeXT was to acquire Steve Jobs and making NeXT the foundation of the company.

IBM acquiring RedHat is a way to play in the cloud field, not to change the complete IBM Organisation, which is huge.

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

#158

Post by galaxyLogic »

davidw wrote: post #148
stirfrykitty wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of truth to this. Since Fedora is the upstream for Red Hat, and IBM historically kill off anything not making a profit, how long before this happens? I wonder if they'll split the two? Red Hat does "control" a disproportionate amount of Linux development. Everything is also now basically dependent on systemd. I'm seeing more and more IT guys I know move over to Free/OpenBSD because they don't like the…

> Linux has become what it hated in Windows. People have been claiming this for the past 20+ years that I've been working with Linux. I'd take it with a grain of salt.

Right, because Linux is still open source. That is its main point and benefit

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

#159

Post by eitally »

voidfunc wrote: post #27

This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing. RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a number of key technologies. Win-win.

I think the challenge is that the IBM team have been literally selling products competing directly (but far less well) with what RH has on their truck. IBM+RH need to formulate and socialize a clear and consistent cloud, product & consulting strategy ... and then they can execute. If they get this out there quickly, they are likely to do quite well. If not -- and this seems more likely, given they should have had this material ready before announcing their intent to acquire -- I'm less confident.

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

#160

Post by kortilla »

Frost1x wrote: post #55
dalbasal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no specific bad feelings about IBM, but I don't like the constant drive towards consolidation. It makes us worse off, I feel. Nearly all these big mergers are about cornering markets, reducing competition and avoiding innovations. At best they're about finance shenanigans. It's not as if redhat customers are likely to be excited about this.

I agree. I think there's enough evidence at this point in time to show that corporate consolidation after a point is no longer beneficial to our society. After a certain point, it's pretty clear to me that consolidation only benefits a few significantly invested shareholders and no one else. I suspect this is somewhere greater than the "big 4-5" we've become accustomed to accepting in every sector, when economies of…

Where is this evidence you are talking about?

This acquisition has the potential of IBM using RH to disrupt the cancer of putting everything on AWS/GCE/Azure by pushing open source-based models.

If there is one thing that’s obvious, it’s that people in this thread have very little imagination of the benefits of teamwork and conjoined efforts. The only thing this is evidence of is the shocking ignorance about businesses.

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