Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM acquires Red Hat

redhat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#911

Post by remedan »

ldng wrote: post #903
JohannesH wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious. Anyone care to outline the legal ramifications of this action? What would happen if IBM tried to stop his side-project? 1. Would IBM be able to enforce the original contract as it was outlined when they sent it to him? Would he be liable to fraud or other similar charges (for instance if he altered the contract after IBM representative added their signature)? 2. Or would the altered contract stand up in…

IANAL, nut I would say 2. You can alter a contract proposition. It was up to IBM to check what was actually signed.

On the other hand, if I intentionally mislead you about the contents of a contract, it might not be binding. If you hand me a 10 page document, I pencil something in on page 7, sign it and hand it back to you without notifying you of the change, I don't thing you'd be required to honour my modifications.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#912

Post by rpiguy »

k_bx wrote: post #837
pookeh wrote: post #763

Having worked at IBM for 10 years, this is what I have come to know how IBM operates top-down: 1. To make significant profits, we need to sell services on top of our software products (this is essentially GBS and their "strong" sales people) 2. To make very good profits, we need to make highly customizable software (for example AI and BI offerings). 3. To make even more profit we need to make sure the software is tun…

What's not clear here is that why would one company, which is dong pretty well, better every year, would want to be sold to another company, which doesn't look well (from your own description), instead of just continuing growing and eventually "winning" the cloud market by themselves? Is that just because top Red Hat people wanted to cash out more quickly?

Amazon, Microsoft, Google. Now that RedHat has to compete against all three, perhaps it felt that now was the time to cash out.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#913

Post by rootbear »

davidmr wrote: post #733
KaiserPro wrote: post #238

So, I have mixed feelings. I don't think in the short term this will be a problem. However IBM has lost it's way. its a very large unwieldy organisation that doesn't change very fast. It also has an awful lot of lifers, who would flounder horribly outside the soft warm IBM shell. But, there are some brilliant engineers and technologies that are inside IBM. The ones I know are about are to do with GPFS, which is a shi…

I definitely agree with you. I’ve been paid more or less to run GPFS over the last 15 years or so (finally free of it for the last few months), and while I hate it with a searing passion, a) it’s far better than the alternatives as long as you can afford it, and b) the people who lead and do the real work on the project are very, very bright. If they keep these people working on hard problems, they’ll do well. If the…

At the risk of topic drift, I'm curious where the problems are with being parallel and POSIX-compliant. I'm at a point where I think I need to consider a parallel file system and I don't have much experience with them, so I'm not aware of the issues.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#914

Post by _ea1k »

mohammedbin wrote: post #765
meditate wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used Windows in quite some time, but I believe they are quite different. WSL is more like a very basic version of Wine in that it implements Linux system calls and can execute ELF binaries, and as such requires you to install a host OS for libc and any other libraries you want. Cygwin is more like Winelib in that it provides a custom libc implementation and toolchain that are natively compiled, and as such…

Wine seems basic and immature in comparison to WSL not the other way.

I can see why you would think that, but there is a reason that many think the opposite. Wine is obviously less compatible than WSL, but it is also a much more ambitious project. For WSL to work, it "only" has to implement the kernel translation layer and then run the various userspace tools that Linux does (GNU tools, Gnome, etc).

For Wine to implement even enough to run Notepad, Wine needs a reimplementation of huge portions of userspace. Of course, this also means it is a little bit of an Apples to Oranges comparison.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#915

Post by jake_morrison »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #497
SwellJoe wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM is, as far a I can tell, the best example of a "mixed bag" in tech. I have heard both great and terrible things about IBM from customers, employees, developers on Open Source projects, etc. They are a huge organization, and one that seems more divided than many. It may be more useful to view IBM as a collection of fiefdoms rather than a single, focused, entity. Yes, the money all goes into one pot at the end of t…

We used to be a huge SoftLayer customer. Then they got bought by IBM and service/pricing/network/everything got worse. Then we left. IBM sucks.

We were a Softlayer customer for dedicated servers before the acquisition. Afterwards, we needed to add additional servers, and IBM wanted 50% more for the same config, already quite high (twice as much as we pay elsewhere). When we needed to increase the RAM from 16GB to 32GB, they wanted $50/month for a stick of RAM that costs about $100.

It's like they are using cloud pricing as a reference for dedicated servers. We run dozens of dedicated servers, and using the cloud would be 10x the cost. Amazon at least has a culture of passing on cost savings to customers.

There was a problem with a server, and I needed to connect to the console. That involved using a VPN, then downloading a Java applet with a very specific (obsolete) version of Java. The applet didn't support copy and paste, and frequently repeated keys. Try typing in a 16 digit randomly generated root password by hand with your keyboard duplicating keypresses. Linode can offer a console over SSH, why not IBM?

Screw IBM.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#916

Post by notyourday »

brazzy wrote: post #841
mcv wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a terrible and completely unreasonable stance for an employer. You get the hours you pay for. You don't get to own people's free time.

One relatively benign reason behind such policies is that the employer wants your free time to actually be free time that helps your recover, not a second job that leaves you exhausted and fighting burnout and sleep deprivation.

The response to this should be "Sure, for 3x the salary"

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#917

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

tilt_error wrote: post #776
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same problem in academia, being in a non-CS department, I'm required to notify the University's Center for Technology & Venture Commercialization about assigning my copyright over software to another entity (like the FSF), but so far I have been unsuccessful at getting them to sign the letter the FSF wants, despite the code I would be contributing being completely outside of my work at the University and s…

Come to Sweden then :) As a researcher you explicitly own the rights to any foreground, i.e. results, as stated by law — the so called teacher’s excemption.

If you have a job for me, I'm happy to. :)

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#918

Post by hajile »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #849
mcv wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a terrible and completely unreasonable stance for an employer. You get the hours you pay for. You don't get to own people's free time.

So when you come up with a solution to a work problem in the shower in the morning or while lying awake in bed in the evening you could sell it to the employer, since you owned that time? What happens if you create something patentable in the eve information related to your employer's business, maybe even to your project. Can you patent it yourself and then collect royalties from your employer? What happens if you in…

In a right to work state, you could indeed walk in, terminate your employment, and file a patent later. You could then charge that company for that work. In civil court, it would be argued as to when you actually had the idea.

In these civil suits, the one with the most money wins, so you would still lose even if you indeed solved the problem after you left.

No need to defend those huge corporations. They're perfectly capable of bribing officials to screw over employees all by themselves.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#919

Post by jammygit »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #849
mcv wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a terrible and completely unreasonable stance for an employer. You get the hours you pay for. You don't get to own people's free time.

So when you come up with a solution to a work problem in the shower in the morning or while lying awake in bed in the evening you could sell it to the employer, since you owned that time? What happens if you create something patentable in the eve information related to your employer's business, maybe even to your project. Can you patent it yourself and then collect royalties from your employer? What happens if you in…

This is a fair argument, but the solution isn't to just strip the employees right to own their own thoughts.

The specific problem seems to be about patents and trade secrets. If a contract covered those two things well, would an employer have legitimate cause to push further than that?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#920

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

umichguy wrote: post #770
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My contract requires that anything I develop using University resources, which in practice means potentially anything in my areas of specialisation, the University has some claim on. It's not entirely unreasonable - imagine someone in Biochemistry developing some drug using University labs etc. and then turning around and selling the formula to a private lab. But it's the petty bureaucratisation which is infuriating.…

If you use any (and I mean any) school funded resources for any of your personal projects, yes, they usually have a basis for a claim. I have a friend who went to Utah for his bachelor's in CS.

I'm not in CS, but my understanding is that the CS dept has a historical relation with the FSF.
Post reply on HN