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Report: Red Hat Buying DevOps Startup Ansible (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to VentureBeat Red Hat Inc is about to buy the company behind the automation and orchestration software Ansible. The move is seen as a good acquisition, since Ansible, other than being almost universally expanding, is also used by Red Hat's own cloud and system platforms. It could probably use some strong backing for the extra services it wishes to offer. The question remains whether this will have consequences in the future direction of the Python-based, open source platform itself (on GitHub). It's one of the most trivial to implement (compared to cfengine, ever-changing puppet or Chef) yet very powerful, and Red Hat may want to optimize it for their own purposes.
Update: 10/16 15:39 GMT by S : Red Hat has confirmed the acquisition and explained their reasons for doing so.
Somebody could convince me with data to the contrary but as far as I can tell Redhat puts the most money into Linux and pays the most developers to work on Linux, therefore the most work is coming out of Red Hat, therefore Redhat work gets adopted at a proportionally higher level. There doesn't need to be any conspiracy - Redhat has the money because they're popular because people like the work they do. It's a totally competitive marketplace - their dominance in enterprise is because their stuff works and is of good quality, not because of any sort of monopolistic bundling agreements - in a free market we cheer the winners!
That said, this is an area in which Redhat has been sorely lacking. If a competitor had come along with a tightly-integrated package manager and DevOps system that would couple with a network deployment system for effective cloud provisioning, Redhat would face some very fast and very intense competition to stay relevant. Fortunately they seem to realize this (finally). They could still blow it by not getting the necessary hooks all the way down into rpm, so their success is not guaranteed.
Now that PuppetLabs has destroyed everything by making puppet 4 incompatible with puppet 3, I'll take a look at ansible.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
FWIW, I've worked for Red Hat for the last year and a half as part of the Inktank Acquistion (IE working on Ceph). So far, Red Hat has been pretty reasonable. There are more RH specific initiatives around Ceph now, and a more of our QA happens on CentOS/RHEL, but the core development process has remained largely the same. In some ways, things are better as Red Hat has encouraged that some of the projects our business folks previously did not want to open source (our Web based monitoring UI) be made community projects. Like any big company there are a lot of different people with a lot of different agendas, but honestly for a company of Red Hat's size I'm fairly happy with how things have gone. You hear about acquisitions being total nightmares for everyone involved. While there have been challenges, at least in my mind, Red Hat is as good of an open source steward as we could have hoped for. I'd much rather see Ansible in Red Hat's hands than many other companies out there today.
Red Hat is the twenty-first century incarnation of Microsoft of the twentieth century.
Ahh; yes. Because RedHat has completely crushed Ubuntu.
No. RedHat is controlling the future of Linux because they actually put up the people who write the successful stuff. If you don't like systemd then you can use Slackware. The thing is, though, that in real life Slackware, great though it is, has limited influence on the future of Linux because limited amounts of new useful software is generated there.
As long as RedHat is largely working with GPL software they will never be able to be anything like MS. When, like Google and co, they start pushing almost exclusively Apache and BSD licensed stuff, that's the point you need to start worrying.