IBM acquires Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#61

Post by sz4kerto » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

bdavis__ wrote: post #9

RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will experience vendor hate to a high degree. But, RH is based on open source. A replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.

RHEL is just a small piece of the Red Hat puzzle that is sold to enterprises. In some way Red Hat is an exception -- there have been no multi-billion dollar businesses built purely on open source except them. (Or maybe I have missed something.)

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#62

Post by pinewurst » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

sz4kerto wrote: post #52

Guys, this is not just, or mainly not RH Linux. :( - kernel development - Ansible - JBoss (I know HN hates Java, especially Java EE, but it was and is an important factor in enterprise OSS adoption) - OpenShift - Ceph, Gluster All these are in danger, not just RHEL. I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS. Canonical is way behind Red Hat in t…

IBM would rather push Spectrum Scale/GPFS over Ceph or Gluster

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#63

Post by paulbjensen » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

Redhat website confirmed it. https://www.redhat.com/en

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#64

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #58

pinewurst wrote: post #3

Hoping this is false! IBM is the worst of acquirers and they treat their people like utter garbage, especially the more experienced ones. If there's any truth to this, it means those in charge have basically given up - assuming growth is capped and/or that the big return of a buyout premium would counter recent stock pricing setbacks. (Update: now officially announced!)

"those in charge have basically given up" Yes but which company's leadership has given up? If this is the ordinary acquisition model, where the buying company (IBM) leadership stays in charge, then I say it's Red Hat's leadership that's given up. If it's the 'buy a company to get an entirely new leadership team' then it means those in charge of IBM might actually understand their dire situation. But I have no idea if…

[deleted]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#65

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #50

If this happens, I see older engineers targeted by IBM as they have done over the for "cost savings" as part of the acquisition.

[deleted]

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#66

Post by redwood » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

The real story here is that cloud is killing them both.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#67

Post by beatgammit » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

bdavis__ wrote: post #9

RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will experience vendor hate to a high degree. But, RH is based on open source. A replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.

Well yeah, there's CentOS, so a company just needs to step up and provide the level of support RHEL customers expect.

I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in.

I really don't understand this acquisition.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#68

Post by tapoxi » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #28

bdavis__ wrote: post #9

RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will experience vendor hate to a high degree. But, RH is based on open source. A replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.

Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Every new cloud thing touted its pre-configured Ubuntu images, for example. Even Microsoft started with Ubuntu with WSL. Maybe that's why a still multi-billion dollar company decided to cash out even as Linux seems to be making inroads. People used Red Hat for the same reason they used IBM: it was corporate, understood corporate needs, and knew how to…

You'll see a lot of preconfigured CentOS images, not RHEL because of the licensing. Red Hat's recent (and sensible) play has been on-prem Kubernetes with OpenShift.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#69

Post by gregknicholson » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

gtycomb wrote: post #24

I use Fedora Linux on my laptop. What does this mean for the Fedora Project? Any thoughts on an alternate OS with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora? It takes about 1 GB to boot up Fedora 27 now. And what's the future for CentOS?

Yeah, Silverblue is just starting to be really nice. :/

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#70

Post by greglindahl » Sun, Oct 28, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

pinewurst wrote: post #3

Hoping this is false! IBM is the worst of acquirers and they treat their people like utter garbage, especially the more experienced ones. If there's any truth to this, it means those in charge have basically given up - assuming growth is capped and/or that the big return of a buyout premium would counter recent stock pricing setbacks. (Update: now officially announced!)

My last startup, blekko, was acquired by IBM in 2015. They treated our people well; many of them still work there.

It takes 6 months to be acquired by IBM, so I don't think recent stock market gyrations have anything to do with it.