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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

#171

A dying company trying to extend their “squeeze your base” policy to another vendor. I think they overpaid for RedHat. After a particularly painful audit at my Fortune 500, we kicked out RedHat. We spend more time talking to IBMs auditors than we do to their Salespeople and engineers. This merger seems like the modern version of HP and Compaq. The only winners are the shareholders who bolt early. Customers, employees…

Just curious, what are you replacing RedHat with?

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#172
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Redhat still operates independently from IBM. Redhat also uses automated license enforcement instead of audits.

For how long?

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#173
post #4

Can someone explain why Red Hat is so valuable? Why would IBM put such a big bet?

Becuase of kubernetes. The platform of platforms. Kubernetes is the andriod to amazon iphone (in analogy). It is the only way to get out of cloud vendor lock in. IBM is mainly a consultancy business, so they basically back integrated with the cloud os - kubernetes, or more specifically in this case - open shift. The only issue here is that are around 23 or more certified kubernetes distors, so this might have been an…

To use for example EKS (Amazon Kubernetes) you still have to provide worker nodes by using EC2 API.. which more or less means your infrastructure management is in the same lock-in as you were previously while simply deploying with EC2 VMs..

Kubernetes doesnt solve the vendor lock in issue completely. You still need workers, external dns, databases, gateways and other to operate.

The strength of Kubernetes comes in development speed. And thats pretty much it. You can push something out pretty fast and scale it. Ah, this and the fact its easier to find newbs familiar with k8s (they often have no idea how to deal with bare-metal).

I wouldnt say the amount of operational work vs normal cloud management is simplified. Managing kubernetes cluster is painful, Ive witnessed 3 updates of EKS where each one broke some part of the cluster: dns / autoscaling / monitoring etc.

But hey it is fast. Building runtime image with immutable layers is a huge adventage in itself.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#174
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do I understand it correctly that when the bubble is going to burst, the value of money pretty much globally will decrease, so its better to allocate them now in assets that are always in demand like land or flats ?

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

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Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#176
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IBM licenses are so obtuse that it can only be intentional. This may be outdated, but they used to use these stupid “processor units” that had some loose correlation to CPU performance. If a perfectly well-intentioned systems person moved licensed software to some new server that had half the cores, but was on a newer generation CPU, and didn’t think to ask the lawyers about it, you could get tagged for huge buck…

> The IBM licenses are so obtuse that it can only be intentional. This is the company who popularised "This page intentionally left blank". Obtuseness is very much part of their toolkit.

> This is the company who popularised "This page intentionally left blank".

That was an objectively good move though.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my ignorance,but what is an IBM auditor?

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.

I worked at a branch of Emerson Electric. We did an inventory of hardware and software and I went from one machine to another running the BSA software and entering each PC into a database. We had IBM OS/2 2.0 as well as DOS Windows 3.1 this was the early 90s. Any software that did not have a license for we had to buy them in bulk from 800 Software to meet auditors specs. It seemed that this was before activation and on floppy disks people had shared.

It paid off because we got a discount on bulk licenses and met auditor inspections. I was a PC Specialist back then.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#178
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I getting it from Jo Beda, the CTO of heptio (now VMWARE). More specifically , from his definition of cloud native. A cloud native system is a system that manage its resources via an API. The vendor locking in this case is the cloud API. I.e. if I want a resource (e.g. a VM) , I need to use the EC2 api. With kubernetes, I write to the kuberentes API which is open source, cloud vendor natural. However, and this the ke…

> In the future (some would say near future), all of the cloud services will be offered as kubernetes APIs (via a set of domain specific CRD) If (big if) some standardized variant of kubernetes "wins." K8s was transparently Google's strategic shot at forcibly commodifying AWS. But everyone has their own agenda. Google, Microsoft, and (to a lesser extent) Amazon could survive in a world of fully commodified compute. G…

> Give their compute assets are essentially surpluses from running their other businesses (advertising, software sales, and online retail).

This is mythology. It is mostly not actually true.

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#179
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the future (some would say near future), all of the cloud services will be offered as kubernetes APIs (via a set of domain specific CRD) If (big if) some standardized variant of kubernetes "wins." K8s was transparently Google's strategic shot at forcibly commodifying AWS. But everyone has their own agenda. Google, Microsoft, and (to a lesser extent) Amazon could survive in a world of fully commodified compute. G…

> Give their compute assets are essentially surpluses from running their other businesses (advertising, software sales, and online retail). This is mythology. It is mostly not actually true.

Source? Do any of the major clouds publish their base, first-party load?

Re: IBM Stops Buybacks to Pay for Red Hat

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

welcome to licensing by companies in the Business Software Aliance: notorious for using disgruntled former employees for starting audits. (they did to my friends company a decade ago and found nothing..) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance) lots of major companies: (apple/adobe....) https://www.bsa.org/membership

The trick? They tell to fuck off and file a lawsuit if they want to audit. They back off. Unless the former employee has actual proof other than a statement they won't bother.

That trick does not work in countries where they come along with the police department responsible for checking if business activities are in accordance with the law.

Here is the Portuguese variant of such police department.

https://www.asae.gov.pt/cooperacao-nacional-e-internacional/...

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