IBM To Buy Red Hat, the Top Linux Distributor, For $34 Billion (bloomberg.com)

International Business Machines (IBM) is acquiring software maker Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion, the companies said Sunday. From a report: The purchase, announced on Sunday afternoon, is the latest competitive step among large business software companies to gain an edge in the fast-growing market for Internet-style cloud computing. In June, Microsoft acquired GitHub, a major code-sharing platform for software developers, for $7.5 billion. IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers. From a press release: This acquisition brings together the best-in-class hybrid cloud providers and will enable companies to securely move all business applications to the cloud. Companies today are already using multiple clouds. However, research shows that 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of today's cloud market. This prevents portability of data and applications across multiple clouds, data security in a multi-cloud environment and consistent cloud management.

IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation. IBM's and Red Hat's partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM's $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.

Comments

It all

[Anonymous Coward]

comes back eventually

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

The circle of life, this one was short. Perhaps 20 years. The first time I heard of Red Hat was when a DBA told me they were running Oracle DB on it in 1998.

Re: It all

[cayenne8]

So, sadly, I"M guessing IBM will acquire and fuck up RHEL just like they've done with every other tool they've bought and "IBM-ized"......

:(

Re: It all

[NFN_NLN]

Nuh uh, look at the market share of OS/2 and AIX. /s

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Lennart already fucked up RHEL, I hope IBM will get rid of him and systemd.

Re: It all

[plopez]

+1

Re: It all

[KiloByte]

So, sadly, I"M guessing IBM will acquire and fuck up RHEL

Uhm, Gnome3, systemd, NetworkManager? Or, have you seen people try to upgrade Red Hat boxes? The only way for RHEL is up.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD is dead. Like, you know, rigor mortis rotting dead.

Re: It all

[gweihir]

Indeed. Maybe they will even sack Poettering. If so, they will do a ton of good.

Re: It all

[HanzoSpam]

Indeed. Maybe they will even sack Poettering. If so, they will do a ton of good.

Surely you jest. Knowing IBM, as I do, they're more likely to make Poettering the head of the division.

Re: It all

[gweihir]

Yes, probably. Although that may work as well, because then it will become completely clear what a fuckup he is and systemd may make its way out of most distros again. (Hey, I can hope!)

Re: It all

[execthis]

So, sadly, I"M guessing IBM will acquire and fuck up RHEL

I think the more accurate term is 'ramp up' not 'fuck up' - more and more Open Source is about vendor on-ramps.

Re: It all

[thegarbz]

Lennart already fucked up RHEL

In what way? Show me your evidence that systemd has in any way affected RHEL's marketshare that didn't drive it to a competitor that also uses systemd.

The way I see it, the only people who actually think he fucked up RHEL are ACs and about 10 vocal slashdot users.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Lennart already fucked up RHEL, I hope IBM will get rid of him and systemd.

Hear, hear.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

My feelings exactly. As a former employee for both places, I see this as the death knell for Red Hat. Not immediately, not quickly, but eventually Red Hat's going to go the same way as every other company IBM has acquired.

Red Hat's doom (again, all IMO) started about 10 years ago or so when Matt Szulik left and Jim Whitehurst came on board. Nothing against Jim, but he NEVER seemed to grasp what F/OSS was about. Hell, when he came onboard he wouldn't (and never did) use Linux at all: instead he used a Mac, and so did the rest of the EMT (executive management team) over time. What company is run by people who refuse to use its own product except for one that doesn't have faith. The person on top of the BRAND AND PEOPLE team "needed" an iPad, she said, to do her work (quoting a friend in the IT dept who was asked to get it and set it up for her).

Then when they (the EMTs) wanted to move away from using F/OSS internally to outsourcing huge aspects of our infrastructure (like no longer using F/OSS for email and instead contracting with GOOGLE to do our email, calendaring and document sharing) is when, again for me, the plane started to spiral. How can we sell to OUR CUSTOMERS the idea that "Red Hat and F/OSS will suit all of your corporate needs" when, again, the people running the ship didn't think it would work for OURS? We had no special email or calendar needs, and if we did WE WERE THE LEADERS OF OPEN SOURCE, couldn't we make it do what we want? Hell, I was on an internal (but on our own time) team whose goal was to take needs like this and incubate them with an open source solution to meet that need.

But the EMTs just didn't want to do that. They were too interested in what was "the big thing" (at the time Open Shift was where all of our hiring and resources were being poured) to pay attention to the foundations that were crumbling.

And now, here we are. Red Hat is being subsumed by the largest closed-source company on the planet, one who does their job sub-optimally (to be nice). This is the end of Red Hat as we know it. Without 5-7 years Red Hat will go the way of Tivoli and Lotus: it will be a brand name that lacks any of what made the original company what it was when it was acquired.

Re: It all

[Mordaximus]

Hell, when he came onboard he wouldn't (and never did) use Linux at all: instead he used a Mac, and so did the rest of the EMT (executive management team) over time. What company is run by people who refuse to use its own product except for one that doesn't have faith. The person on top of the BRAND AND PEOPLE team "needed" an iPad, she said, to do her work (quoting a friend in the IT dept who was asked to get it and set it up for her).

Which year of "linux on the desktop" was this? Lots and lots of Linux shops don't run Linux on their Desktop systems. At least they opted for a UNIX. Similarly, what tablet does RH offer?

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Suck it you commie fuck

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple isn't a unix. Apple is a company that paid to attach the unix brand to their mess. Windows with Interix is just as much a unix.

Re: It all

[Joey Vegetables]

Hear, hear.
Sorry. Can't do that. My system runs pulseaudio.

Re: It all

[slashdot_commentator]

Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM, so I have no first hand clue whether anything I say here is accurate.

People associate IBM from epic computing market leader to afterthought. So they conclude that because IBM isn't as valuable as Microsoft or Google, that their management must be fuckups. But that may not be the case.

Computing was vastly different 2 to 3 decades ago. PCs only had a presence in large companies, and were extremely uncommon in the home. In this era, IBM was the biggest beast in the industry, because the industry was all mainframes and COBOL. For IBM to have grown in the computing market in that time period, they would have had to have been market leaders in the bleeding edge of consumer technology, and it wasn't their bailiwick. Its not that IBM did a Wang, and sat comatose while the PC ate their lunch. They saw themselves as a computing infrastructure company, and they chased developments that related to their industry, like SQL and cloud. They didn't do crappy consumer products.

You can try to fault them for not going into those fields, but those fields started as entrepreneurial endeavors, and IBM didn't do startups. PC/internet startups are also unusual in that it took them an extremely short time to become large cap industry leaders (Google went from nobody to industry monopoly in less than 5 years.). In that instance, they are too "highly valued" to even be bought out. Its not like IBM became brokeass penniless; they are still the company to go to for computing infrastructure. They are also close to the same valuation they were 10 years ago; IBM just didn't become 1000x more valuable in that market segment. If you want to call IBM management incompetent, you can say the same for any large industrial company, like GE or GM. None of them went into the consumer computing field, like Microsoft, Apple, or Google.

The only way IBM can fuckup RHEL is if they shitcan their current CEO/COO and force RHEL to behave and price their product/services like an industry monopoly that it is not. I think its unlikely they will do that. What IBM is doing now is converting what "little" capital they still have to acquire a business they have no footprint in. IBM is a computing services company now, but they behave in a manner that makes it extremely unlikely they will become leaders in cloud or netstorage or any other nascient computijng service likely to experience explosive growth. (Basically, they provide concierge computing services, and charge unsustainable, ridiculous prices for it.) In any case, IBM is not any more likely to fuckup their acquisition than what Oracle, Google, or Microsoft has done. (But oddly, IBM is tiny compare to the market valuations of the previous three.)

Re: It all

[golden_hands]

My feelings exactly. As a former employee for both places, I see this as the death knell for Red Hat. Not immediately, not quickly, but eventually Red Hat's going to go the same way as every other company IBM has acquired.

Red Hat's doom (again, all IMO) started about 10 years ago or so when Matt Szulik left and Jim Whitehurst came on board. Nothing against Jim, but he NEVER seemed to grasp what F/OSS was about. Hell, when he came onboard he wouldn't (and never did) use Linux at all: instead he used a Mac, and so did the rest of the EMT (executive management team) over time. What company is run by people who refuse to use its own product except for one that doesn't have faith. The person on top of the BRAND AND PEOPLE team "needed" an iPad, she said, to do her work (quoting a friend in the IT dept who was asked to get it and set it up for her).

Then when they (the EMTs) wanted to move away from using F/OSS internally to outsourcing huge aspects of our infrastructure (like no longer using F/OSS for email and instead contracting with GOOGLE to do our email, calendaring and document sharing) is when, again for me, the plane started to spiral. How can we sell to OUR CUSTOMERS the idea that "Red Hat and F/OSS will suit all of your corporate needs" when, again, the people running the ship didn't think it would work for OURS? We had no special email or calendar needs, and if we did WE WERE THE LEADERS OF OPEN SOURCE, couldn't we make it do what we want? Hell, I was on an internal (but on our own time) team whose goal was to take needs like this and incubate them with an open source solution to meet that need.

But the EMTs just didn't want to do that. They were too interested in what was "the big thing" (at the time Open Shift was where all of our hiring and resources were being poured) to pay attention to the foundations that were crumbling.

And now, here we are. Red Hat is being subsumed by the largest closed-source company on the planet, one who does their job sub-optimally (to be nice). This is the end of Red Hat as we know it. Without 5-7 years Red Hat will go the way of Tivoli and Lotus: it will be a brand name that lacks any of what made the original company what it was when it was acquired.

Don't worry, they will all be punished for this- they will now have to use Lotus Notes.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Market share != usability.

Fuck tard.

Re: It all

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Where is the "+1 Terrifying" mod when you need it?

Re: It all

[kenh]

The evidence that supports claims of Russian collusion in the 2016 election don't point to the Republicans, but you knew that, right?

One group involved in the 2016 election passed payments thru a law firm to an opposition research group to fund an investigation of a presidential candidate based *exclusively* on uncorroborated claims made by Russian operatives with ties to Putin Admin and paid for those stories with money from a presidential campaign.

We've known for a year about Democrat payments to buy intel from Russian intelligence officers, we have yet to hear of evidence the trump campaign colluded with the Russians.

It's been 8 years since Democrats held the House, 4 since they held the Senate - they lost both under the previous democrat administration. Maybe - MAYBE - Democrats will take the house, big whoop. That's what normally happens in a new administration's first midterm.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh When the Open Group says they are, they are.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Systemd rocks. I hated it at first because I did not know it, but now I love it. Lennart Poettering is an asset IBM might want to hold on to.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, they will all be punished for this- they will now have to use Lotus Notes.

I am currently an IBM employee, and thankfully that is no longer true. I haven't had to use Lotus Notes in years, and have been using IBM Verse, which is essentially IBM's version of Gmail. It's not perfect, but it works reasonably well and anything is better than Lotus Notes. The company has also recently started a new initiative where people can opt to use Outlook or Apple Mail if they wish.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

I do work for IBM, and though I don't pay much attention to the high-level business stuff, all of that seems fairly accurate. IBM is a huge company, and it takes time for a company like that to change and adapt, but it is certainly something that the company is trying to do.

And all indications are that IBM is going to mostly leave Red Hat alone as an autonomous unit. IBM has had a long history and partnership with Red Hat ,as well as contributing a lot to open source in general. So I don't think much is going to change, and IBM just wants to strengthen it's position in the hybrid cloud infrastructure space.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Republicans will prevail. Youâ(TM)re so wrong. Go sit on a donkey dick.

Re: It all

[slashdot_commentator]

And all indications are that IBM is going to mostly leave Red Hat alone as an autonomous unit.

In which case, IBM will still fail. IBM needs to bifurcate its money making hardware and services section (legacy concierge computing) out of its decision making and make some "big bets" on where they think they can create new computing markets. They're advancing technological research, but they're not converting it into a money making advantage.

Microsoft tried to do this by laying bets (investments) on various market niches like gaming hardware, developer tools, and cloud, and then forced out Ballmer for a technologist who could better advance that agenda. They understand that desktop OS will eventually be a dead duck, and are now trying to convert their market advantage into all sorts of endeavors, primarily in cloud computing (Azure). Unfortunately, I think they're only looking to convert their business customer base towards their new "products", but at least they understand they need to provide value in order to create a stable new market.

Google's response was to recognize that their search/advertising engine is mature, and they can't allow it to "interfere" with entrepreneurial efforts, so they separated their major startups outside of Google (Alphabet), and can now "budget/invest" in those startups entrepreneurially, while not affecting the share price of their butter and egg company Google. It would be nice to think that they will still enable Google to be a form of incubator and talent pool for new, internal endeavors, but that remains to be seen. (If only they could fix their horrible, clueless marketing and operations infrastructure.)

IBM may have figured out that their current, money making operations is a dead duck, but they still have to figure out how to transition beyond it, and they'll have to make some big gambles for them to stay relevant. Gina Rometty strikes me as someone utterly unequipped to decisively lead that kind of transition. They can't dump 3 billion dollars to acquire Red Hat, and then expect to get their money back from customer leads and business "synergy". I sort of speculate that they will see Red Hat as leading their transition towards smaller businesses with larger overall market (the customers they currently can't attract), but it won't work without RHEL providing better value (and probably small margins). And its still a losing strategy; you grow market value by creating new markets, not finding ways to better monetize acquisitions.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

The decision to investigate the Trump campaign was based on the FBI's assessment of Russian election interference with the goal of harming Clinton and helping Trump, not the Steele Dossier. If you think that what Fusion GPS did is more harmful to our democracy than Cambridge Analytica, then you deserve to live in the propoganda-fueled autocracy that Trump is trying to create.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple isn't a unix. Apple is a company that paid to attach the unix brand to their mess. Windows with Interix is just as much a unix.

Maybe not a UNIX-Unix, but it's a BSD-Unix, which is to say it contains code that traces its lineage back to 4.4BSD.

However, BSD essentially became a Unix(TM) clone because of licensing issues with AT&T, so in that sense it's Unix-in-name-only.

Windows with Interix is nothing at all like Darwin.

Re: It all

[Anonymous Coward]

Citations needed for your claims, but "whatabout-isms" can only get you so far.

Whether or not there was collusion between the Trump and Russia does not automatically mean or have anything to do with the democrats did or did not do.

Just because Clinton used a personal devices for government-related tasks does not mean Trump should do the same.

They're both idiots and unethical bastards, and you're perfectly allowed to think the same.

Enjoy yer jerbs wile uze can!

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is gonna send a bunch of dev jobs overseas. And no, quality doesn't decline - they have proved it. They have been doing it for over 40 years and it's been very successful.

Why pay an American when you can get someone smarter for half the price? Wage arbitrage - still a lot of life in it.

Re:Enjoy yer jerbs wile uze can!

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh man, good one. Yes, IBM definitely has not declined in quality since they started offshoring. Oh boy, man. That's a good one! hahahaha!!!

Re:Enjoy yer jerbs wile uze can!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just another repeat of Oracle and Sun, Microsoft and GitHub, and Viacom and Nickelodeon

Re:Enjoy yer jerbs wile uze can!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, most of redhat's development seem to already be in lower cost places like Czech republic, and has been for some time, so I am not sure they have to send people out...

Re:Enjoy yer jerbs wile uze can!

[plopez]

The work I have seen from overseas, reviewing pull requests, have not borne that out. Usually the AMerican staff did the wrong thing and fixed it for the overseas staff.

Re:Enjoy yer jerbs wile uze can!

[Anonymous Coward]

Viacom and Nickelodeon

Grow up and stop watching children's cartoons.

Re:Enjoy yer jerbs wile uze can!

[Anonymous Coward]

t. Pajeet

Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

So begins the slow bleed of IP, human capital, and other other remaining value of a major Linux maintainer.

Re:Please God No

[alvinrod]

Yeah once they're done, they're done. It's not like they couldn't just get together and and start a different distribution. Alas.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

Look on the bright side: Poettering works for Red Hat.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

So begins the slow bleed of IP, human capital, and other other remaining value of a major Linux maintainer.

Why do you think the bleed would happen slowly?
I would see quite rapid decline in the user base, as CentOS users will jump ship and commercial cloud competitors (MS, AWS, Google) will also try to avoid using IBM's RedHat from now on... Thus, IBM will realize that the value of the RedHat will plummet, so they will throw the organization in trash soon enough.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

When you pay 34 billion dollars for a business there are going to be all kinds of non-compete clauses in the contract. Theoretically RedHat could make copies of every piece of software they currently maintain, sell IBM everything , then start up a new company called RedHat Unleashed and continue their work with 34 billion dollars to help get the new company setup.

Re: Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't force you to sign an NDA....

Re:Please God No

[alvinrod]

Depends on the state. Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in some jurisdictions. IBM would want some of the people to stick around. You can't just take over a complex system from someone else and expect everything to run smoothly or know how to fix or extend it. Also, not everyone who works at Red Hat gets anything from the buyout unless they were regularly giving employees stock. A lot of people are going to want the stable paycheck of working for IBM instead of trying to start a new company.

However, some will inevitably get sick of working at IBM or end up being laid off at some point. If these people want to keep doing what they're doing, they can start a new company. If they're good at what they do, they probably won't have much trouble attracting some venture capital either.

Re: Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

No. That's why they are handing them 34 billion dollars.

"Here's the 34 billion dollars we talked about. Got that NDA signed yet by your top devs? No? Well your 34 billion will be waiting for you when you do."

Re:Please God No

[gtall]

"A lot of people are going to want the stable paycheck of working for IBM instead of trying to start a new company. "

Errrrmmm....I see you haven't been getting the memos. IBM has been bleeding their U.S. personal as fast as they can. Red Hatters would do well to eyeball their exit strategies.

Re:Please God No

[ir0nHat]

Red Hatters would do well to review history how IBM treated ROLM, and how IBM was able to handle a start up culture. IBM sales team and Red Hat's will be a shotgun marriage for sure. CentOS should already feel the cold of hell, as they have a short TTL.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that IBM is more interested in providing services I would expect them to just stop CentOS and make RHEL free.

Re: Please God No

[wyattstorch516]

The people getting handed 34 billion dollars are the stockholder not the employees. The vast majority of that money goes to people who do not work at the company.

Re:Please God No

[wyattstorch516]

Red Hat went public in 1999, they are far from being a start-up. They have acquired several companies themselves so they are just as corporate as IBM although significantly smaller.

Re:Please God No

[squiggleslash]

Well, CentOS is right there already.

TBH, I don't see a problem. What IBM sells these days is consultancy and support, they do have a few "packaged" products but even then the way they make a lot of the money is through integration. I can see it being in IBM's best interests to keep the RedHat model alive, maintaining a first class distribution and selling support to fund it.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

Look on the bright side: Poettering works for Red Hat. (Reposting because apparently Poettering has mod points.)

Re: Please God No

[plopez]

They are already signed by the staff, if any. Otherwise it would be contingent on employment, "sign this or you we walk you off of the property". That is what "at will" employment means. But no, Americans are too stupid to unionize.

Re:Please God No

[Man On Pink Corner]

Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in some jurisdictions

It's my understanding (IANAL) that those laws don't apply when equity is transferred.

$34 billion deals don't come with golden handcuffs. They're more like bomb collars.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people are going to want the stable paycheck of working for IBM instead of trying to start a new company.

  However, some will inevitably get sick of working at IBM or end up being laid off at some point. If these people want to keep doing what they're doing, they can start a new company. If they're good at what they do, they probably won't have much trouble attracting some venture capital either.

That is probably the best oxymoron so far. Stability with IBM. The company that hasn't made its numbers in excess of 20 quarters and keeps the stock price up
by cutting the staff.

Re:Please God No

[ir0nHat]

Referring to culture; agreed Red Hat is not a start-up, but “The Open Organization” is purchased by “Product-type divisional organizational structure”. When was the last time the CEO of IBM sat on the service desk? Also ROLM was far from a start-up, but there culture was and is reflected in Silicon Valley today. “West Coast Hippies” purchase by “East Coast Button-ups”. Going from a “Great Place to Work” to a cog in the machine.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, they could call it RedHatD

Re:Please God No

[jmccue]

ah - Red Hat was founded in Raleigh NC and their headquarters are still there. Last I heard Raleigh NC is on the East Coast

Re: Please God No

[jpaine619]

You don't think we have unions here? I ask because you didn't say "some Americans".... You said "Americans are too stupid to unionize".

Kindly fuck off. You are talking out of your ass.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an ex ROLM employee. Ummm. Yeah. Exactly what ir0nHat said. This sucks, CentOS 6 was my "go to" distro for servers due to stability.

Re: Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

They are already signed by the staff, if any. Otherwise it would be contingent on employment, "sign this or you we walk you off of the property". That is what "at will" employment means. But no, Americans are too stupid to unionize.

You can join a union if you want; there are plenty of them that will gladly take your dues and hand it to the Democrats to run their campaigns.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

Red hat has tried for years to gain consultancy business by making the corporate admins clueless. For a two decades IT departments gained knowledge on system building and management but RH flushed that down the toilet by re-inventing the wheel by systemd. So their efforts of breaking things actually pays off now and IBM can start milking support hours by breaking things even further on every OS release. Soon there will be kerneld, filesystemd and backupd with completely re-implemented, buggy and undocumented feature set.

Re:Please God No

[Anne Thwacks]

Raleigh NC is on the East Coast

Well wave good bye. IBM will fly it to Bangalore just as soon as they can find the planes to do it.

Re: Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

For many of us moving away from RHEL or CentOS is difficult as hardware manufacturers often only provide software, or only warrant versions of it even if they provide it for other distros, on RHEL or close cousins.

Re:Please God No

[Antique Geekmeister]

The core CentOS leadership are now Red Hat employees. They're not clear of nor uninvolved in this purchase.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shut up already chicken little.

Re: Please God No

[houghi]

First the Americans need to understand the difference between a Union and a Guild. From what I see, the US Unions are unions by name only. They are a guild.

The difference is that a guild protects the jobs and a union protects the workers (Or both have that intention at least). In Europe we have had Guilds for a while. Look at any main marketplace in many cities in Europe and you will see that the most lavish houses where on the great market and where build by guilds. They protected the nakers, the bitchers and so on.
Not a member of the Guild? Not allowed to sell or make things in the city. Stopped being a baker? Sorry, nobody to speak for you.

Have an invention that makes your job obsolete> They will fight as hard as possible to either stop that invention or keep you occupied, even if you are redundant in that job.

A Union is something diffreent. They will look at the people and see that they have a job. Might not be the job they had before, but still. From somebody in Belgium:
I have been a UNion member for (I think) 10 to 15 years. I became a member the day I lost my job. Not because they would do anything about keeping my job, but because they made it easier to get my unemployment benefit. Almost no paperwork for me.

The Unions fought for the unemployment benefit. And let it sink in: you can be a member of a Union if you are unemployed.
And I can become a member of almost any union. There are some unions that are specific for secors, others are general. I have been a member of the same union and can be a member, regardless of what my job is, or even if I have a job.

Say my company downsizes (Have seen that several times) the unions can step in and negotioate not only what the objective bases are who to let go. They can also negotiate the saevreance pay. That way I got one year 7 months , went to a company for a year and got 5 moths there. That was not even due to the unions. It was the companies that offered that much, because it was cheaper than negotiating with the unions.

And the reason I say uinins, is because there are many. And every company that has more than 50 people will have union representatives.

Yet you can join a union even if you work at a smaller company. You can also decide NOT to join a union. It is completely up to you when and if you join or leave. No person in the company will care. (Union representatives are an exception) Seriously, nobody will care. Not your cowworker, not your managere, not the CEO.

And thanks to these unions, I have 34 days of paid holiday, a 13th month, paid sickdays, maternety and paternity leave and no overtime.

Does that mean they can not fire me because I am in a Union? No. The fact that I am in a union is irrelevant. They can still fire me. If I steal, they can fire me on the spot. No benefits for me after that. They can also fire me because whatever reasons. Howvere they would need to do a payout of several months. And the longer you work somewhere, the more they need to pay.

So understand that there is a difference between a guild and a union. A guild is a bad idea. A union is a good one.

Re: Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

The people getting handed 34 billion dollars are the stockholder not the employees. The vast majority of that money goes to people who do not work at the company.

Actually, it's more like they'll get handed 34B worth of *IBM stock*. And just how much do you think that will be worth 6 months later?

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a good time to spin off SystemD inc. into its own entity.

Re:Please God No

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been through an IBM acquisition. They will offer key people approximately one year's salary to stay on for 24 months. If you got that offer, good for you - take the money, you'll be safe through two years (I did and I was). If you don't get that offer, or you get less, you are in danger.

I don't get this

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not start your own distro instead? Buy some clients? What for?

And good luck getting the putrid poettering putty out of everything.

Re:I don't get this

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's more for Red Hat's cloud infrastructure, than the Linux distro itself.

Re:I don't get this

[redmid17]

Lol you don't have to think. It's literally in the press release:

IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption.

Re:I don't get this

[link-error]

I'm not sure how much legs the whole 'hybrid multi-cloud' actually has. Our company looked at the RedHat platform and decided to jump to straight cloud. We'll be running some small IAAS software on-prem for a brief period while we transition. We'll see how much lock-in they can get for the customers that do buy into it.

Re: I don't get this

[Anonymous Coward]

Ideally you want to build solutions that are capable of running on multiple clouds so that you could, if required, run on another cloud provider in the event of down time on one, to avoid vendor lock in, or to play the spot markets. Achieving data coherency for something relatively monolithic is not trivial, though.

You may want to use a hybrid solution if you have to process some workloads on premise for regulatory or other reasons, but with a variable total workload, so you can potentially sweat the local physical assets by running additional workloads that can run in the cloud at other times. It can also be part of a business continuity arrangement to have at least some functions replicated locally.

I suspect that cloud offerings will mature and regulatory changes will ultimately mean that cloud will be totally dominant outside HFT and other financial institutions within ten years, or probably five. Regulatory change can be slow, hence hedging my bets.

Re:I don't get this

[zdzichu]

This is interesting, in a bad way. The only reason listed is that Red Hat develops OpenShift - a Kubernetes distribution with fancy Web UI.

Re:I don't get this

[slashdot_commentator]

IBM isn't buying a distro. They are buying a computer services company.

Red Hat doesn't make its money from its distro. That's why you can get it for free. Red Hat produces its distro as a form of "branding", and then sells support services off of its flavor of distro. Red Hat could eliminate its distro and just work off of Debian, but then they would lack the ability to prioritize infrastructure issues and development, and they would have a harder time of convincing paying companies to purchase their services. The sad truth is its cheap to hire coding monkeys, even industry leading monkeys, and that's why Red Hat is providing them for free. The real money is being made attracting customers with real money to part with it for their support services.

Re:I don't get this

[slashdot_commentator]

The company that ends up dictating the cloud industry will not be doing so by infrastructure lock in. Forget about industry leaders like Amazon, Google, and (way behind) Microsoft. The company that "wins" will do it by offering the best ROI, and constructing a set of cloud services that seem indispensable and intrinsic, at the lowest operational cost.

Damn.

[TechyImmigrant]

I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Until someone buys them too.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian then?

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can say that again. Ubuntu and Centos have been rumored to be targets of various tech behemoths so I wouldn't count your chickens just yet

Re:Damn.

[sanf780]

And I would have to move to Suse. Otherwise I will not get support for the EDA software.

Re:Damn.

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.

Why? Is there some specific IBM behavior you object to? If so, please explain it here.

If it’s just a dislike of corporate involvement with Linux... Red Hat was the wrong distro for you in the first place.

Re:Damn.

[williamyf]

Or switch to suze

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch to Debian if you are afraid of buy issues.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM license fees are predatory. Plus they require you to install agents on your servers for the sole purpose of calculating use and licenses. IBM exploits workers by offshoring and are slow to fix bugs and critical CVEs (WAS and DB2 especially)

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Microsoft. :-)

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

They manage to ruin support for everything they buy. Their licensing is convoluted and extremely inefficient. I have started asking vendors if there is any chance that they will be bought by IBM...

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM bitches fire every worker (95%) over 45 years old. Pricks need a ... ONO better not say that ... but UNO what I mean ...

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what you are saying...

Re: Damn.

[jabuzz]

Not noticed that for either TSM or GPFS, or Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Scale as IBM like to call them these days.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

To switch to Ubuntu from what? Fedora, Centos? It would be the right move, even if IBM didn't acquire RedHat

Re:Damn.

[redmid17]

IBM has a history of, uh, aggressive lawsuits with respect to IP and bend companies over barrels with licensing fees and legal fees. They are valid more often than not, but having a history of corporate shakedowns doesn't make you many friends.
Some of those patents are, well, not as sound as a lot of tech people would prefer.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

switched from Centos to ubuntu a few years back, never looked back, very nice distro, debian is a better system. You should check out proxmox, also Debian-based.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cannonical has been blojobbing M$ so long and so hard you could believe they're an over-aged Cali-com CongressCritter looking for a new Demo-slut sugar-daddy.

Re:Damn.

[The Evil Atheist]

IBM buys a company, fires all the transferred employees and hopes they can keep selling their acquired software without further development. If they were serious, they'd have improved their own Linux contribution efforts. But they literally think they can somehow keep selling software without anyone with knowledge of the software, or for transferring skills to their own employees. They literally have no interest in actual software development. It's all about sales targets.

Re:Damn.

[0100010001010011]

If so, please explain it here.

IBM Rational DOORS: Starting at $5,460.00 USD
IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation: Starting at $164.00 USD per user per month

And that's pricing I can find. I don't even want to know what we're paying for IBM ClearCase.

IBM buys companies (Like Rational) and milks by exorbitant fees. They're only slightly 'better' than Oracle.

I expect anyone that doesn't have an IBM RedHat Certification(tm) won't have the 'full warranty'. Here let us direct you to one of our training centers.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised if IBM ends up buying Debian though.

Re:Damn.

[Luthair]

Red Hat hired the CentOS developers 4.5 years ago.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM license fees are predatory.

I don't know about that, none of the open source IBM software I use has any license fees, predatory or otherwise. Some are GPL but I don't count that as predatory.

Dragon is a pretty nice OpenStack backup system I've been using in house for some time now.
Got it off github too

LLVM in the kernel is pretty amazing stuff for managing LVM, RAID, and other similar systems.
Far more stable than ZFS has ever managed to reach.

I've even played with their Watson speech-to-text stuff, which is a service offering not a software download, and even that is free as in doesn't cost money if you aren't going to be sending them a massive number of API requests every minute.

Plus they require you to install agents on your servers for the sole purpose of calculating use and licenses.

Simply not true, I've never had to do this. The closest "evil software" I've ever had to install to run some IBM software is Java, and that's Oracles fault not IBMs.

IBM exploits workers by offshoring and are slow to fix bugs and critical CVEs (WAS and DB2 especially)

So does RedHat, and many companies for that matter. If you are against off shoring, then nothing at all has changed here.

I can't comment on "WAS" or DB2 bugs, never used them. But I guess sure, RedHat fixes CVEs damn fast and is a high bar to stand up to.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

While the republitard congressmen are all caught in the bathrooms with other outies

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not about corporate involvement. If you don't know why people hate IBM, you don't either work in the IT industry or you work there but you suck at your work. Seriously, I have never met a person that can do good work and likes IBM. I have met many who hate IBM and have good skills and I have met some who like IBM and are really hard to deal with, because you can't use logical reasoning with them. E.g. they are not ready to select best product, they want to select products that IBM recommends.

My personal hate comes mostly from the experience of using IBM products and getting "help" from their technical support.

If you don't hate IBM, please tell us why you love IBM and how their products are better?

Re: Damn.

[Gabest]

Back to Slackware then.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, just 7 more years of Lennart

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is not a public company. They are a community of developers, authors, artists, etc. There are not an entity in the business sense to be acquired. Debian will be one of the last distros left that is not commercialized. Slackware is another. Perhaps Arch and Gentoo.

I've been giving thought to switching over to OpenBSD and NetBSD for my personal needs, as Linux is really balkanized these days. systemd and the new CoC are really icing on the cake for my decision.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

The did contribute lots to the TPM software stack... Open source.

But yeah, I know what you mean. That's the only example I can think of.

Re: Damn.

[unixisc]

FreeBSD finally seems to have stabilized TrueOS so that it now works smoothly on my laptop.

Re:Damn.

[StormReaver]

I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.

Since Red Hat has only ever been good as a server operating system (and it ceased being good at that around Redhat 5), I recommend going straight to the mother of operating systems: Debian.

Re: Damn.

[mrtexe]

How do you enable TRIM support on TrueOS to not kill the SSD?

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Better Microsoft than IBM. Funny how things end up

Re: Damn.

[ClickOnThis]

Better Microsoft than IBM. Funny how things end up

Not sure about that. I suspect MS bought github as a way to migrate those developers over to Visual Studio Online.

Re: Damn.

[kriston]

Has not been like this for decades, sir.

Re:Damn.

[kriston]

Are we forgetting who contributed the proprietary UNIX code from SCO UNIX to the Linux project?

I'll hang up and listen for your answer.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

How much is Ubuntu. I know Ubuntu's only bigger than Redhat in the GNU/Linux desktop enthusiast "market", if it can be called that. While Redhat is bigger in everything else, including the much coveted Enterprise. But I reckon that Ubuntu should be worth a significant fraction of that say $5Bn? Since it's basically a one-man board of directors, Ubuntu CEO Shuttleworth is going to have lots of money for several trips to the Moon and beyond.

Re:Damn.

[rtb61]

Actually IBM, most likely, they think M$ is now vulnerable and want revenge for what wee willie gates the turd's, mommy and daddy did when they conspired with IBM lawyers (close associations there and they got a cut in the investment), to basically screw over IBM investors on copyright with the operating system on IBMPCs, well compatible PCs.

So is M$ vulnerable enough for IBM to OS/2 them (keep in mind IBM would have fucked over M$ with OS/2 if they had not been so idiotically greedy on the price, yeah windows would be a has been if IBM had not been of the same idiotic ilk as the Lotus eaters, who 123ed themselves off into extinction with delusions of market dominance)?

So is IBM going to take a run at M$ by copying Apple ie selling YOU privacy, not selling YOUR privacy. How vulnerable is M$, they definitely on the low side of public popularity, really low, taking into account their phone bomb billions, zero smart TV penetration, MSN pretty much forgotten on the internet and everyone loves to hate M$, fuck em ;). They are pretty fucking vulnerable right now, riding incredible arrogance over how much they can fuck over their users.

Re:Damn.

[Billly Gates]

I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.

Why? Is there some specific IBM behavior you object to? If so, please explain it here.

If it’s just a dislike of corporate involvement with Linux... Red Hat was the wrong distro for you in the first place.

IBM charges Cadillac prices and consulting fees and then onshores Indians fresh out of college with no experience for 10x the cost it would be to do it yourself. We had a call center at another employer get wired by IBM and they put in spaghetti wires where to this day 13 years later we have ethernet cables taped to the floor. We caused an outage by moving the cart in the server room over one of them. 1 million dollars!

What makes matters worse is we can't fix the wiring EVER as we need 24 x 7 uptime as we have latin American call centers get routed through the spaghetti wiring on the floor to the dialer IVR. IBM couldn't have done a worse job!

In 2002 companies consulted with IBM as they were deamed superior over competition even if they are ultra expensive. Today, they use Oracle or smaller companies and have learned the message. IBM is a has been from a different era.

At least Oracle didn't buy them. That would enrage me to know end but still all the good people will be fired and outsourced by cheap Indians and Russians and it will go to die soon.

Re: Damn.

[Billly Gates]

IBM aint stupid ... ok well maybe. The stuff that is profitable you can bet your ass won't be free. Example is IBM's java you cited. In Gentoo in 2004 I remember using portage to install it.

Today it aint free anymore as management wanted to capitalize on it and prevent Oracle from stealing their trade secrets (like they are worth anything). They are a company not your friend or open source organization. If they spent $34,000,000,000 you bet your ass they want to maximize their investment to pay for it!

Remember Oracle bought Java to sue Google and ruin copyright law forever to fuck over Mysql and MariaDB.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

My advice to Red Hat engineers is to get out now. I was an engineer at a company that was acquired by IBM. I was fairly senior so I stayed on and ended up retiring from the IBM, even though I hated my last few years working there. I worked for several companies during my career, from startups to fortune 100 companies. IBM was the worst place I worked by far. Consider every bad thing you've ever heard about IBM. I've heard those things too, and the reality was much worse.

IBM hasn't improved their Linux contribution efforts because it wouldn't know how. It's not for lack of talented engineers. The management culture is simply pathological. No dissent is allowed. Everyone lives in fear of a low stack ranking and getting laid off. In the end it doesn't matter anyway. Eventually the product you work on that they originally purchased becomes unprofitable and they lay you off anyway. They've long forgotten how to develop software on their own. Don't believe me? Try to think of an IBM branded software product that they built from the ground up in the last 25 years that has significant market share. Development managers chase one development fad after another hoping to find the silver bullet that will allow them to continue the relentless cost cutting regime made necessary in order to make up revenue that has been falling consistently for over a decade now.

As far as I could tell, IBM is good at two things:
1. Financial manipulation to disguise there shrinking revenue
2. Buying software companies and mining them for value

Yes, there are still some brilliant people that work there. But IBM is just not good at turning ideas into revenue producing products. They are nearly always unsuccessful when they try and then the go out and buy a company the succeeded in bring to market the kind of product that they tried and failed to build themselves.

They used to be good at customer support, but that is mainly lip service now. Just before I left the company I was tapped to deliver a presentation at a customer seminar. The audience did not care much about my presentation. The only thing they wanted to talk about was how much they had invested millions in re-engineering their business to use our software and now IBM appeared to be wavering in their long term commitment to supporting the product. It was all very embarrassing because I knew what they didn't, that the amount of development and support resources currently allocated to the product line were a small fraction of what they once were. After having worked there I don't know why anyone would ever want to buy a license for any of their products.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well IBM is not going to end development of Red Hat. What's going to happen is the same kind of bullshit that happened with Oracle and Cisco when they bought OSS projects. They strip-mine them for IP and then offer "premium" versions with all their proprietary bits added in.

Unlike Oracle (which is pure evil), and Cisco (Which is pure evil, but less ballsy than Oracle) , IBM's been shedding it's businesses that don't make money in favor those that make money, and more of a defender of the OSS status quo.

What this means though, is that CentOS might disappear. IBM might say "no more derivatives", and while they can do that, it means that any fixes they contribute to the Redhat Linux kernel, never makes it into the mainline kernel.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Is there some specific IBM behavior you object to? If so, please explain it here.

Quarterly Layoffs and the abuse of all their employees and especially contractors. I feel bad for the RedHat employees right now.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I will lay odds that you replaced that cable and taped it back right back down where it was again.
1. Why did no-one tell these technicians off for putting non-OH&S standard rigging in, much less doing shoddy work? Floors MUST be cleared.
2. Why did you not realize that without redundant systems, everything must be up all of the time?
3. Who the hell signed off stating the plan was good and correct? Who the hell signed off the work stating it was good and correct?
4. Why have YOU not fixed the problem after knowing about it for 13 YEARS?!?!?
Realize that your downtime of the cable being run over was a perfect time to replace that damn wiring. Throwing your hands up and complaining that everyone else has things wrong is solving nothing.

Re:Damn.

[TechyImmigrant]

And I would have to move to Suse. Otherwise I will not get support for the EDA software.

My day job is designing chips, so I use Suse at work all day.
Running the same distro at home as at work is poor form.

Re:Damn.

[TechyImmigrant]

To switch to Ubuntu from what? Fedora, Centos? It would be the right move, even if IBM didn't acquire RedHat

Fedora mostly. Not because it's better. Just because I've been using it daily for 15 years and inertia is a thing.

Re: Damn.

[houghi]

Why, so you can give power to another company? Why not SUSE, not owned by Novell anymore.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll hang up and listen for your answer.

That sounds like honest interest. Like "I'll gag you and listen to what you say."

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

That was APK. Clearly.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect MS bought github as a way to migrate those developers over to Visual Studio Online.

GitLab says: "Good luck with that".

Re:Damn.

[thegarbz]

Why? Is there some specific IBM behavior you object to? If so, please explain it here.

This is IBM we're talking about. Why would you need to be specific? The result would be environmentally unfriendly. The amount of power consumed by my computer during the time I spend listing specific objectional behaviour from IBM could solve global warming. That and even if I didn't have a job I would need to sleep at some point too.

There's not enough hours in the day to complain about IBM.

Re: Damn.

[Gavagai80]

IBM is a services company. Has been for a long time now. They're not about software sales.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

CLEARLY not. Too engrishy. apk cant engrish, so he's parsefail.

Re:Damn.

[houghi]

I asume you mean Suse. Suze is either a drink or you are thinking of Suze Randall. That is something completely different.

Re: Damn.

[pnutjam]

OpenSuse has some Sure merged into it. It's a fine choice for home, but hard to defend as a corporate server.
Even the long term version requires you to switch repos every 18 months and perform a 'distribution upgrade'. Minor releases don't seem to be fully risk free either.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure IBM can afford the $37.19 that Slackware would cost.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, please explain it here.

IBM Rational DOORS: Starting at $5,460.00 USD ...

Sooo, you think $5,000 for a proper tool for a programmer that costs an employer probably more than $100/hour is exorbitant?

Ever take the time to notice how many thousands of dollars worth of tools a carpenter shows up with to build your fucking house?

Or maybe you think that carpenter should only use a $20 claw hammer and a $15 hand saw?

Geez, how long do you think it would take for that carpenter to build your house? While you're paying him by the fucking hour?

Putting a programmer in a seat costs a company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And you're bitching over the cost of something that - if used in that programmers work flow - could save weeks or months of effort?

You're fucking stupid and downright shortsighted.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, Red Hat isn't any different. Open source has always been their "grass is greener" gateway into an IBM-like support dependence. IBM can now spin down WebSphere without having to give up any of the business model.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.

Why? Is there some specific IBM behavior you object to? If so, please explain it here.

Maybe because IBM is poison, and destroys everything they touch? People will switch not because they "dislike corporate involvement", but because they fear for the continued viability of the distribution and the product lines.

Re: Damn.

[kiphat]

Then IBM's acquisition of Rehat is a perfect fit, since Redhat doesn't sell software either.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

To those who say this isn't so, check out licensing for some of their software such as Cognos, etc. They do require agents to monitor how many CPUs you are using, etc. It's a very onerous licensing process to say legal with, and IBM delights in catching customers who may have added vCPUs to their systems and nail them with six-digit fines and penalties. IBM sucks.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch Suze for those sharper images of OS!

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I expect anyone that doesn't have an IBM RedHat Certification(tm) won't have the 'full warranty'. Here let us direct you to one of our training centers.

Not a fan of IBM (at all), but as a user of their systems and software for about 20 years, I've never seen that. I've definitely had problems with them, but not that problem.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

DOORS was priced similiarly before IBM bought it.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus they require you to install agents on your servers for the sole purpose of calculating use and licenses.

Simply not true, I've never had to do this. The closest "evil software" I've ever had to install to run some IBM software is Java, and that's Oracles fault not IBMs.

Simply put, it is true. Just because you did not have to use it does not mean that Flexera does not exist.

  Discussing a company as large as IBM is like discussing Health Care. Everybody knows some cousin, uncle or girlfriend that beat cancer with a mix of Yoga and scented beads. The truth is always uglier.

Have you ever bought anything from IBM with a price tag? You are out of compliance but not yet caught.

To use a car analogy, licensing from IBM is like speeding on the Highway. There are only so many officers who can extract so many dollars, I mean make an example for the safety of others, by pulling people over.

You will soon be required to hire or train up someone dedicated to running IBM's audit software. Goose-stepping and daily patriot pledges are just a bonus.

Re:Damn.

[0100010001010011]

A carpenters tools equivalent of doors would be a brick for a hammer and what ever they could dig out of the dumpster.

DOORS quality and pricing is on par with Craftsmen these days. Both now made in the same hemisphere too.

That's cheaper than our Mathworks licenses but we actually get decent value out of them, unlike DOORS.

Re: Damn.

[lactose99]

I'm buying Debian next week.

-Symantec

Re:Damn.

[shadowknot]

I concur. I work on both z/OS and z/VM and have never felt any pressure to get any kind of certification. Quite the opposite in fact, they have provided me with no-strings, gratis education so I can work on the products more efficiently. IBM isn't perfect but this particular problem is very much made of straw.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I would agree that IBM is far from perfect I think saying that people "fear for the continued viability of the distribution" is a bit on the ignorant side considering IBM has developed and continues to enhance and support some of the longest-lived operating systems there are. If you don't know the history of z/OS, z/VM, z/TPF and z/VSE I would suggest you look into it, I guarantee you unknowingly use them on a daily basis.

Re:Damn.

[slashdot_commentator]

One day you'll be fifty years old, and you won't be doing technology for funsies. At that point, you'll be looking for the "stablest" environment that requires the least amount of technical apochrypha necessary to accomplish your basic tasks. I have seen so many old technologists move to Apple products for that reason.

Re:Damn.

[shadowknot]

While I understand this suspicion and it may be true, IBM has a track record of contributing code back to the mainline kernel after investing substantial amounts of money in that development. It's true that I'm referring to them contributing money for development specifically for platforms they own (Z and P systems) but I hope they follow a similar model now that they have an ownership stake in the biggest x86 server side distro. I don't really see how they could say "no more derivatives" given that much of what Red Hat has done is likely derivative of GPLd projects itself. Frankly, if they take systemd and tie it up in a proprietary license I'll be happy since it'll turn it into the MiniDisk/BetaMax of init systems!

Re:Damn.

[slashdot_commentator]

I'd say IBM and all the Microsoft haters missed their chance at schadenfreude by not wielding the knife while Ballmer was the CEO.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Type your question into google you cuck.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed. Because it's still like that. Fuck off ibm shill.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell?

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Found the ibm management shill.

Keep drinking the kool and getting lied to.

Also everything you posted you pulled out of air. NONE of it is rooted in fact.

Re: Damn.

[Billly Gates]

Easy. It was late and it had to be completed. We were told we can fix it later but the CEO promised to the Client it would be done by 4am for 6am calls. That time never came to fix it as I would get in trouble if I spoke up

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

slow to fix [...] critical CVEs (WAS and DB2 especially)

Sorry, I'm calling bullshit on the CVEs. I work in L2 support for an enterprise product at IBM built on top of WAS. When we find a security vulnerability and get the right data from the customer it goes straight to the owning development team. They respond within 24 hours most of the time with an APAR number if its legit. Thereafter it goes through IBM's PSIRT process to get a CVE and legal+executive signoff if the CVE score >= 7.0. APAR goes through internal testing and gets released as an iFix within a week or two usually. Technote Flash is authored thereafter once the APAR is available on fixcentral. IBM does not screw around with security vulnerabilities - as greedy as they are - its too costly NOT to treat them seriously.

 

Plus they require you to install agents on your servers for the sole purpose of calculating use and licenses

You are going to have to be more specific on which software you are talking about. That is definitely not true for WAS or DB2. If your company has their ducks in a row and a good track record of active licenses in use against which servers you are fine. The agent is a tool to help automate that for large enterprises which are trying to manage hundreds of different software installs across thousands of servers. It is not mandatory for either of those products.
 

IBM exploits workers by offshoring and are slow to fix bugs

Both true statements depending on which part of IBM you are working with.

Re:Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an IBM employee through an acquisition, and have worked closely with people from another acquisition, and they didn't fire anyone from either company. So, I guess your mileage may vary. It's been several years so some people have moved on (on their own), but most of the people I worked with from the original company are still here.

Re: Damn.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's talking about ILMT. If you use a licensed product that you bought to use on 2 cores, but you have a 64 core server, you install ILMT to prove to IBM you didnt use 64 cores.

Re:Damn.

[TechyImmigrant]

One day you'll be fifty years old, and you won't be doing technology for funsies. At that point, you'll be looking for the "stablest" environment that requires the least amount of technical apochrypha necessary to accomplish your basic tasks. I have seen so many old technologists move to Apple products for that reason.

I'll be 50 years old before Christmas happens. I'm a principal engineer at a large semiconductor company and I've done techy things in a variety of techy discipines.
I use an Apple laptop because it's decent hardware with a unix like environment under the hood. I can bring up a bash shell and write in a variety of languages using Vim and compile my latex all on the command line. My servers run Fedora usually. I have a new desktop (technically subdesk - I build the PC and water cooling loop into the desk to keep it quiet and out of the way) running Ubuntu.

I still do technology for funsies - Messing with my Apple ][, building high tech guitar electronics, writing programs for fun. Then I go to work and get to work on bleeding edge technical problems, designing circuits, analyzing data, scouring research papers generally pretending to be smarter than I feel I am.

Re:Damn.

[slashdot_commentator]

generally pretending to be smarter than I feel I am.

My God, I'd hate working with you. Your ego could probably fill the building. j/k

As for tech for funsies, God bless. We all do tech for funsies, but there's too much out there to master to retain a functional level one could consider competence. And no one gives you the heads up that your mental faculties decline with age. You learn to cut out low value pursuits from your bucket list; kind of like when you get married and have kids.

Re:Damn.

[TechyImmigrant]

Kids went to college.

Ego Schmeego. That's for psych types.

Anybody else sick of

[Anonymous Coward]

decent businesses always getting bought out by some behemoth and eventually becoming junk?

Re:Anybody else sick of

[Anonymous Coward]

When, exactly, was Red Hat not junk?

IBM Linux is the best Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Tivoli Linux is the best Linux.

Re: IBM Linux is the best Linux

[jabuzz]

Keep up at the back there, it will be Spectrum Linux. With a bit a luck I might not need separate licenses for my Spectrum Protect (nee TSM) servers in the future. Though oddly Spectrum Protect for Virtual Enviroments seems to be a SuSE based VM.

Re:IBM Linux is the best Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Lindows Linux is the best Linux.

doesn't that finally explain systemd

[epine]

Once upon a time, IBM pretty much invented the monolith. Just goes to show, the wannabe doesn't fall far from the tree.

A Cloudy argument.

[Ostracus]

IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers.

It's all open source. What's stopping them from developing to the Cloud, NOW?

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably they're buying their customer base.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers.

It's all open source. What's stopping them from developing to the Cloud, NOW?

This. The market value of RedHat is not in coming from the platform and code itself, but rather its service business and the customer base on that side.
Of course, the userbase of RH and CentOS is one factor as well, but that can disappear overnight, especially with IBM now calling the shots.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[alvinrod]

Probably capital investment and lack of talent. It's not as though you can magically build a massive cloud infrastructure from the ground up in short order if you don't already have people who know what they're doing. You're going to need data centers, equipment, technicians, etc. It might take several years for everything you need to be build, delivered, and installed. Then you need to attract customers away from Red Hat, which may not be easy and while you've been building up just to reach the position where Red Hat is right now, they're unlikely to sit there and watch all of it happen.

IBM likely ran the numbers and concluded it was safer for them to buy Red Hat than to try to build a comparable business unit from within the company. Red Hat currently does about $3 billion annual in terms of revenue, so if IBM thinks that they can grow that further and cut some operation costs, then it might be more viable than sinking billions into their own solution and watching it struggle to gain market traction.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're buying the staff so they can make them fix IBM's cloud services.

Then the crappy IBM engineers who know little about Red Hat will bleed over to Red Hat and ruin the distro.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably capital investment and lack of talent. It's not as though you can magically build a massive cloud infrastructure from the ground up in short order if you don't already have people who know what they're doing. You're going to need data centers, equipment, technicians, etc. It might take several years for everything you need to be build, delivered, and installed.

They already have the infra and knowhow available. Has been since the acquisition of Softlayer back in 2013.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can personally attest to their nuttery. They've been *trying* to develop cloud, for years. Years and years. They *can't*.

Each attempt fails. They open up entire divisions, and close them after failure. They simply can't do anything cogent, any more.

Hence the buy.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[gtall]

So you are saying that IBM has been asleep at the wheel for the last 8 years. Buying Red Hat won't save them, IBM is IBM's enemy.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever built a scalable cloud platform from scratch?

It's pretty easy. College students do it. Perhaps not CS people, but the rest of tech certainly does. It's the modern teenage nerd's version of compiling a kernel yourself.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's stopping them from developing to the Cloud, NOW?

Fuck competition may be?

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

The best Red Hat talent and branding clearly lies with the Red Hat team but $34B is a lot of money.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[The Evil Atheist]

IBM engineers aren't actually crappy. It's the fucking MBAs in management who have no clue about how to run a software development company. Their engineers will want to do good work, but management will worry more about headcount and sales.

Re: A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat hasn't either. Unless you're still trying to make OpenShit work.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Aighearach]

They're already one of the large cloud providers, but you don't know that because they only focus on big customers.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM mo longer has engineers, they laid them all off in the early 2000's and replaced them with off-shored contractors.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers.

It's all open source. What's stopping them from developing to the Cloud, NOW?

Because in the name of stock price, they have let all the talented people with experience in enterprise level work. IBM no longer has any tacit knowledge as to why things where built they way they were.

Re: A Cloudy argument.

[illiac_1962]

Or they could have held in to thier PC division and dwarfed all those numbers selling laptops. I think the world is literally going crazy.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

Profits, not sales. Imagining that they can do roughly $2 billion in profit on, oh well, at most $1 billion in revenue.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

the userbase ... can disappear overnight

it will take more than one night thanks to the entrenchment of [RH]EL in gov't circles

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is MBA's are experts on optimizing and understanding process.

Managing Retail, Finance, Manufacturing, Hospitals and medical facilities, construction, et-cetera. It's all data processing and PM work with some politics mixed in.

Engineers however by definition, do not have a straightfoward process, and each engineers personal process is different. An engineer that has produced a world-changing product may never again, and a young kid given enough resources, may produce great things consistently. You try to control labor and material consumption with metrics and can end up invalidating the entire investment you've made, and not know it at the end of it, or end up believing something ruinous that turns you into a shoe-poliser faking it until you make it. That day may never come and in the meantime, some a-hole might come along and call you out.

And what they really, realyl do not like, is the fact really great engineers and engineering managers can hand them the X's and Y's they need for their formula, which just makes them feel like they are shelf stockers and shoe polishers. They didn't spend the dosh and time getting the MBA to be spoon fed anything, they want to be making decisions, enjoying the allure of power and money.

Trying to get the two to work together is an incredibly difficult endeavour. Helpdesk on up through sysadmin, any software developer or architect, or any IT Staff, for example, if they want to be paid well, need to job-hop every few years. MBA's don't like things they can't control.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where have you been the last 5-10 years? All the non-crappy IBM engineers have moved to Apple, Google and Amazon. What's left are the ones who didn't want to pick up and move.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[DontBeAMoran]

And the ones working at Apple can't do shit because of the industrial-designer-in-chief wants everything flat and non-intuitive.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Thelasko]

IBM engineers aren't actually crappy. It's the fucking MBAs in management who have no clue about how to run a software development company. Their engineers will want to do good work, but management will worry more about headcount and sales.

That's the story for every product development company ever.

It could be worse. IBM could have decided buying Red Hat was too expensive, and buy Red Star instead. Rename it "Big Blue Linux" and sell it for a premium because it has the IBM name. Profit!

That's what really terrible companies do.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Rick Schumann]

IBM likely wants to accomplish the same thing Microsoft wants to do, which is to 'own' Linux, but they're taking a different track to that goal by buying Redhat outright, rather than subverting it like Microsoft is doing.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM owns Softlayer. They've been cloud for more than 10 years.
http://softlayer.com

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're extremely inexperienced to think engineers run good companies... Technical managers are the most inefficient and actual management. A lack of individual capabilities should not be confused here.

Re:A Cloudy argument.

[The Evil Atheist]

I have not seen evidence that MBAs run good companies either.

Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn...

Hopefully, this will have little effect on Cent and Fedora

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[guruevi]

Fedora is fully owned by Red Hat and CentOS requires the availability of the Red Hat repositories which they aren't obliged to make public to non-customers..

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Luthair]

Red Hat hired the CentOS developers 4.5-years ago.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[quantaman]

Fedora is fully owned by Red Hat and CentOS requires the availability of the Red Hat repositories which they aren't obliged to make public to non-customers..

Fedora is fully under Red Hat's control. It's used as a bleeding edge distro for hobbyists and as a testing ground for code before it goes into RHEL. I doubt its going away since it does a great job of establishing mindshare but no business in their right mind is going to run Fedora in production.

But CentOS started as a separate organization with a fairly adversarial relationship to Red Hat since it really is free RHEL which cuts into their actual customer base. They didn't need Red Hat repos back then, just the code which they rebuilt from scratch (which is why they were often a few months behind).

If IBM kills CentOS a new one will pop up in a week, that's the beauty of the GPL.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Anonymous Coward]

Implementation consultants for other distros will be in-demand, probably polishing their resumes as we speak.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[infolation]

requires the availability of the Red Hat repositories which they aren't obliged to make public to non-customers

...and this is why Richard Stallman Calls Open Source Movement 'Amoral'. But RH must make the source publicly available under the GPL.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Anonymous Coward]

repositories which they aren't obliged to make public to non-customers

deppends on the specific license; GPL requires either giving the source to the customer with the product (in which case any one customer could republish) or for a period of at least three years make the source available to any third party

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Anonymous Coward]

Crap, I love Fedora. What am I going to do now?

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Anonymous Coward]

Continue to use Fedora?

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[bobby]

If IBM kills CentOS a new one will pop up in a week, that's the beauty of the GPL.

Probably, but would you rely on it for a production server?

I need to build up a new server. We've had several RedHat and now CentOS running quite well. Looks like it won't be CentOS; future too uncertain.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[unixisc]

How about the great Oracle, since Oracle Linux is nothing more than RHEL w/ Oracle's people responsible for both OS and DB?

Re: Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of CentOS like RHEL clones. Oracle is one, Scientific Linux is another.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Dr. Evil]

"... RH must make the source publicly available.."

That's not what the GPL says.

You only have to distribute the source code, or an offer to the source code to the recipient of the object code. It doesn't need to be public. RHEL's been good about making it public, especially since they do not publicly distribute the object code.

For CentOS to continue receiving the complete source code from IBM, they would need to subscribe to every single product that they republish the object code for.

This is not to say they couldn't get it from someone else who subscribed, but if IBM doesn't distribute RHEL in a similar omnibus form, it could be very difficult to set up reliable relationships with all the organizations which subscribe to every component of what is now RHEL.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Dr. Evil]

Don't you mean the repackagers?

CentOS developers were always RedHat. That's the point.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[neurovish]

The RHEL/CentOS relationship is not adversarial, and the impact of CentOS on RHEL sales is likely overall or wash or maybe a net positive. It's the "first one is free" mindset. You get people using CentOS for free, so the skillset and familiarity is there for RHEL. If CentOS wasn't there, then a company that would have run it would be saying to itself "well, I guess we'll just pay for RHEL licensing", they would either use another free distro or just use Windows, which is likely cheaper anyways.

Companies that use RHEL will also factor in CentOS to the overall environment cost. A full complement of Dev/Testing/UAT/Prod with RHEL licensing is more expensive than the same deployment with Windows. Use CentOS for all or even a portion of those outside of production and RHEL becomes more cost effective.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Anonymous Coward]

If IBM kills CentOS a new one will pop up in a week, that's the beauty of the GPL.

There is already Scientific Linux as a CentOS alternative.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Luthair]

You're being pedantic.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[lactose99]

Scientific Linux is already this and very similar to CentOS, owned/administrated by Lawrence Livermore Labs.

Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent

[Anonymous Coward]

Used it (Fedora) for many years in production (small HPC business) as it generally outperforms the EL out there.
Of course it has (more) warts and you have to be good at defining a stable set of features that are must haves and be
flexible enough to move away if needed.

systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

The next version will be branded IBM(R) SystemD/2.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe half of systemd is an improvement? [*ducks*]

Re:systemd

[Artemis3]

If they remove Poettering, i'd take a look!

Bed Fellows

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll make great bed fellows. One is the king of making bureaucratic nightmare software and having it well adopted in the Linux community, and then you have IBM. I wonder where IBM will lead systemd.

Market cap

[Anonymous Coward]

Is $20 billion. WTF?

They’ll be rebranding the distro

[93 Escort Wagon]

Henceforth, it’ll be known as “Big Blue Hat”.

Re:They’ll be rebranding the distro

[TFlan91]

You joke... but...

I could honestly see Trump reading a headline "IBM rebrands Red Hat to Blue Wave" and going bat-shit over it

Re:They’ll be rebranding the distro

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't honestly see Trump or anyone in DC to say the words "Red Hat" or "Linux" anytime soon.

Re:They’ll be rebranding the distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora is already the blue hat, what a coincidence.

Re:They’ll be rebranding the distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day when Apple partnered with Motorola and IBM on the PowerPC, someone painted all the stripes on the apple logo the IBM blue color.

Re:They’ll be rebranding the distro

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd call you partisan, but to be honest the guy is really that dumb.

Re:They’ll be rebranding the distro

[jzarling]

The new OS2 WARP!

Say it isn't so

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is failing. IBM needs Red Hat to try to keep IBM's business going. While IBM has publicly been a longtime supporter of Linux (unlike Microsoft, yuck!), IBM also has been one of the top companies to file software patents. Plus, other companies IBM bought were assimilated (not unlike the Borg) and then brought down far below they were before IBM bought them (e.g. Lotus). So I don't see this as anything good for Red Hat.

At least it's not Google or Microsoft

[wet-socks]

Probably.

Re:At least it's not Google or Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Naww... Google will be acquiring Canonical if anything.

Re:At least it's not Google or Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

or Oracle...for IBM it makes sense (server market) but what I fear is steering it in the wrong direction, or towards a more closed offering.

Poettering

[Anonymous Coward]

One can only hope this was IBM taking one for the team in spending $34 billion to shitcan Poettering

All Redhat employees over 50 to be fired!

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM hates the olds! All People aged 50+ will be fired and replaced with coders fresh out of blockchain bootcamps! Also, all operations will be moved to a shanty town in India, those not willing to take a pay cut and relocate will be replaced with Indians.

Re:All Redhat employees over 50 to be fired!

[Luthair]

More likely sent off-shore to India.

Re:All Redhat employees over 50 to be fired!

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM hates the olds! All People aged 50+ will be fired and replaced with coders fresh out of blockchain bootcamps!

No, age discrimination is bad. Can't do that.

First you require all employees to update their current skill information in a spreadsheet for some random reason.

Then you do level 4 + employees are encouraged early retirement. It's just cheaper than the aggravation.

Then you start the selective purge, that just happens to target all the old people...

So technically its not age discrimination. Its salary discrimination.. :)

Re:All Redhat employees over 50 to be fired!

[Anonymous Coward]

parent: "will be replaced with Indians."

You misspelled "street shitting hindu-chimps". Hope this helps!

Re:All Redhat employees over 50 to be fired!

[Anonymous Coward]

How long till IBM ships Poettering to India? weeks/months? Can we buy futures based on his declining health? This is great news.

Re:All Redhat employees over 50 to be fired!

[hcs_$reboot]

All People aged 50+ will be fired

You mean everyone, mostly.

Re:All Redhat employees over 50 to be fired!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they get rid of Pottering? He designed systemd and pulseaudio, software so successful that every major Linux distribution includes them by default. You don't get rid of employees that successful and productive.

Goodbye Redhat.

[The Evil Atheist]

IBM acquisitions never go well. All companies acquired by IBM go through a process of "Blue washing", in which the heart and soul of the acquired company is ripped out, the body burnt, and the remaining ashes to be devoured and defecated by its army of clueless salesmen and consultants. It's a sad, and infuriating, repeated pattern. They no longer develop internal talent. They drive away the remaining people left over from the time when they still did develop things. They think they can just buy their way into a market or technology, somehow completely oblivious to the fact that their strategy of firing all their acquired employees/knowledge and hoping to sell software they have no interest in developing would somehow still retain customers. They literally could have just reshuffled and/or hired more developers to work on the kernel, but the fact they didn't shows they have no intention of actually contributing.

Re:Goodbye Redhat.

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the part about shipping the entire mess to India, which is the standard IBM business model.

Re:Goodbye Redhat.

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL that's awesome imagery. FWIW, I agree with you 100%.

Re:Goodbye Redhat.

[brunes69]

While what you say is true of acquisitions in the past, I think if you looked at more recent acquisitions from the past 10 years you will find a lot more success.

Re:Goodbye Redhat.

[Anonymous Coward]

in which the heart and soul of the acquired company is ripped out

Good thing, as Red Hat doesn't have that problem!

Re:Goodbye Redhat.

[Anonymous Coward]

The brand name will continue to exist for a decade at most. "IBM Cloud OS" will replace it eventually -- although hopefully something replaces the term "the cloud" prior to that.

What's wrong with AIX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not cloud ready? I actually did like AIX back the day. The documentation was pretty good. jfs was fairly innovative.

Re:What's wrong with AIX?

[acroyear]

jfs was good, and so was SMIT, their software management tool. No GUI based admin system has ever come close to what they had in 1992 and 1993, from any vendor*...and every time RedHat got close, oh so close, they threw it all away in the next distro and started over. Repeatedly. This constant need for something new instead of actually improving what you have so far has been the killer to desktop linux more than 'apps' are. (yes, I understand much of that is the fact that the services and other features being configured keep changing their file formats in massively incompatible ways and so any parser to provide a UI has to be totally rewritten every 3 months...but that's ANOTHER problem with open source...)

* Chromebooks are only 'good' here because the options they allow you to configure are so few.

Re:What's wrong with AIX?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with AIX?

They killed the x86 port before it really got off the ground?

possible outcomes

[radux]

the possibilities ... OS/2 compatibility, Presentation Manager instead of Gnome/KDE, systemd for AIX?

Re: possible outcomes

[Anonymous Coward]

AILinuX maybe ?

Re:possible outcomes

[kriston]

I know you're kidding, but AIX, like Solaris and MacOS X, already have their own suites of tools that provide all that systemd does and more. Solaris, in particular, has had theirs since 2002.

Re:possible outcomes

[xanthos]

and a Micro Channel kernel driver

Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

I havent used a RHEL based distro in years.... This is a hard pill to swallow. It's quite unfortunate because now we'll definitely see the decline of all things RHEL.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that Red Hat does quite a lot more than RHEL though.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Unfortunately it's mostly systemd.

Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Qbertino]

Oh, wait, /. is a US joint. Ok, forget about what I said.

And now attention:
Getting modded into earths core in 3,2,1 ... :-)

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[ARos]

Clearly you are not employed in tech; otherwise you wouldn't ask such a dopey question.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the first distro I learned, so I've got some fond memories from many years ago.

Lately, I've been using Mint, which I like. I'm wondering why they'd spend billions when they could
have simply forked most of it, then bought the rest.

Maybe there's something I haven't seen.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[quantaman]

Oh, wait, /. is a US joint. Ok, forget about what I said.

And now attention:
Getting modded into earths core in 3,2,1 ... :-)

Virtually anyone running an actual production system.

I hope IBM keeps them pretty separate. One of the reasons RHEL is so successful is they've done a good job of maintaining a good relationship with the hobbyist crowd. They're not as cool as Ubuntu but they have a lot of fans in the community, both devs and users, and that helps them get into the server rooms.

Probably Red Hat's biggest liability has been their size, the more Free Software aligned crowd is very nervous about big corporations. If they ever start losing the community some other distro is going to start popping up in the server room.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Anonymous Coward]

RHEL is LTS to the max.

We people that run the actual production servers for software that has been available for more than six months and is expected to be available for at least the next six months love LTS. Change is the devil. The longer we can stave off change in a documented, tested system, the more money we save.

The end.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[sconeu]

They just need to fire Poettering

Re: Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Anonymous Coward]

Or he may live in EU(SSR) where SuSE still dominates. In which case he would have bigger problems than what distro he uses.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you fire an employee that produced systemd, pulseaudio, and contributed to many other projects that were widely successful and adopted by the majority of Linux distributions?

You don't get rid of successful productive employees.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, it's possibly he's one of those devops fucks who wants to run Shitbuntu on everything.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Anonymous Coward]

Run production on SuSE for years (since 99) and always have FreeBSD in my back pocket.
RHEL/Fedora/Centos have only within the last 10-12 years become the only game in town for enterprise.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Anonymous Coward]

"I hope IBM keeps them pretty separate. One of the reasons RHEL is so successful is they've done a good job of maintaining a good relationship with the hobbyist crowd. They're not as cool as Ubuntu but they have a lot of fans in the community, both devs and users, and that helps them get into the server rooms."

Not a chance in hell. IBM has a lot of history smearing their shit all over whatever they touch.

Look at softlayer.com. On day one of their purchase (a few years ago), they slapped a huge IBM logo bar on the top of the site for no damn reason other than to mark what was now theirs. Then a year or so ago they forced all the softlayer accounts over into an IBM SSO system.

It's all downhill from here folks.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Anonymous Coward]

REDHAT and SUSE is used very commonly in Europe within the Enterprise environment.

Debian is only good for hackers and its rarely used in Enterprise community as it doesn't have any professional support or certified hardware.

Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!??

[Areyoukiddingme]

Why would you fire an employee that produced systemd, pulseaudio, and contributed to many other projects that were widely successful and adopted by the majority of Linux distributions?

Because his code is shit. Pulseaudio is laughably broken on 90% of the distros that include it, and can not be fixed.

You don't get rid of successful productive employees.

You do get rid of drooling morons whose total lifetime code output couldn't make up for the tens of thousands of hours wasted by sysadmins trying to deal with his shit.

No one ever got fired...

[Anonymous Coward]

For buying Red Hat!?

Cha-Ching

[Nkwe]

Red Hat closed Friday at $116.68 per share, looks like the buy out is for $190. Not everyone will be unhappy with this. I hope the Red Hat employees that won't like the upcoming cultural changes have stock and options, it may soften the blow a bit.

Oracle Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder when Oracle Linux will fork or re-base on another distro?

Actually, it would be great!

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as M$ starts distributing GPLed software, their IP lawsuits would fall apart.

BSD is the City of the Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I went out to *BSD's grave on Decoration Day. The old forgotten cemetery is to be found adjacent to the dark woods beyond the edge of town. There within olfactory distance of the municipal treatment plant you will find *BSD's final resting place.

*BSD's tombstone was shrouded by thick mosses and knots of noxious ivy. A mournful funerary crow sounded the requiem, as I gently pulled aside the tangled twists of thorns, and cleaned the decaying marker the best I could. A suffocating melancholia filled my heart, while I pondered that this indeed was *BSD's figurative charnel house of which so many have plaintively spoken.

Nothing is so pitiful as an untended grave, a loved one now forgotten. The short sad life of this doomed and fated OS makes us realize that there but for the grace of God go all of us.

I planted some wilting marigolds, found discarded in the waste heap behind the caretaker's shack, wishing that by some miracle these fleurs de mort might take root and bring a modicum of cheer to *BSD's God forsaken plot. My fervent hope is that the torpid colored boy, who so carelessly mows the grounds, doesn't slice them down, inadvertently mirroring *BSD's own doomed encounter with death's irresistible scythe.

Funny how things work out. Linux, that brilliant novam stellam, now runs the Internet and the world's fastest computers, while *BSD lies moldering within its forgotten crypt. Let the barren silence of *BSD's tomb be a mute reminder that hubris and braggadocio were no defense on that woeful day when the Angel of Death's bleak umbra was cast upon *BSD.

Outsourced

[Anonymous Coward]

All RedHat employees will be fired and replaced by foreign workers. Of course, RedHat employees will train their replacements.

Re:Outsourced

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why if/when you work for a behemoth, you cash your shares out as soon as they vest and stash the money for a rainy day. Your 401k is portable. I would refuse to train my replacement and just walk away with 2 weeks notice if they would honour it. If not, coming from Red Hat, one should likely find another job fairly easy if they had any real skills.

I wonder if the recent attempt to purge Linus...

[Anonymous Coward]

was related to this deal being worked out behind the scenes...

AIX Redux

[DougDot]

Oh, good. Now IBM can turn RH into AIX while simultaneously suffocating whatever will be left of Redhat's staff with IBM's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy.

This is what we call a lose - lose situation. Well, except for the president of Redhat, of course. Jim Whitehurst just got rich.

Re:AIX Redux

[ArchieBunker]

Redhat is damn near AIX already. AIX had binary log files long before systemd.

Re:AIX Redux

[DougDot]

Redhat is damn near AIX already [...]

Yes, but now they also get IBM's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy.

Re:AIX Redux

[Tough Love]

Worse than Redhat's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy? Maybe, but it's close.

Re:AIX Redux

[DougDot]

Worse than Redhat's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy? Maybe, but it's close.

I used to be a Redhat dev, pre IPO, and I worked with IBM for about 15 years With, not for. Trust me: IBM has top honors here re: crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracies.

Re:AIX Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we'll get lucky and see the demise of systemd. I doubt it but I can hope, can't I?

How many companies has IBM destroyed or let die?

[Streetlight]

I can think of two: Lotus Development and ROLM Telecom. Readers can probably name others. Will Red Hat be next? Depends how much they leave Red Hat alone, but I'm not betting they'll do that.

Lol

[ArchieBunker]

With systemd how can they fuck it up worse than it already is?

Re:Lol

[cayenne8]

With systemd how can they fuck it up worse than it already is?

Well, it *is* IBM....I'm sure they can still make it worse.

The only company I know that ruins software they acquire worse than IBM, is CA.....it may survive IBM, but if CA buys them, it is an instant mark of death for the software.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Merge SystemD with traditional AIX management tools with binary configuration database?

Re:Lol

[cheesybagel]

You forgot Oracle.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

With systemd how can they fuck it up worse than it already is?

Well, it *is* IBM....I'm sure they can still make it worse.

The only company I know that ruins software they acquire worse than IBM, is CA.....it may survive IBM, but if CA buys them, it is an instant mark of death for the software.

Symantec. It's where good software goes to die.

Re: Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that i have no issues with using systemd and every slashdotter does? Yeah, im using it at home to manage a desktop and a swarm of raspberry pi 3s. Maybe too simple to see it mess up?

Re: Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

The SystemD resistance comes from the basic principles, the process, the dependencies and the personalities, as I see it. Add that some dangerous, or trivial bugs, wrong assumptions and the mess is ready. I got the same feeling with the Windows 8 UI. I didn't mind the new UI as it fixed the Windows 7 startup menu bugs, or wrong assumptions of behaviour I had encountered. A Harry Potter Interface, with magical mouse gestures to pop up the active elements was my impression.

Re:Lol

[Z00L00K]

Don't SMIT me again!

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft. You forgot Symantec.

Re:I wonder if the recent attempt to purge Linus..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's actually a good comment. Linux has really declined in the last few years. Yes, there are some good distros, but Linux is balkanized beyond belief, one reason why it never gets desktop traction outside of tech circles. The new Linux CoC is straight from the pits of hell and not needed. OpenBSD has the best mantra: "Shut up and hack!"

Notice the fast acquisition of smaller/medium-sized tech companies lately. GitHub, RedHat and many others. Pretty soon, the big 5 will own everything worthwhile. Debian looks really good now, and perhaps even Slackware and Arch and Gentoo.

This buy may have Linux distros dropping systemd, which makes good sense. Now, anything Linux that is IBM-affiliated may actually be compromised.

Re:I wonder if the recent attempt to purge Linus..

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenBSD is dead. It's the Halloween OS.

lynch the CEO and give it to the workers

[Anonymous Coward]

Death to corporatist looters.

systemd is RH

[MikeKD]

All these lamentations! But this might be the opening we need to kill systemd!

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

As if Canonical was without sin.
I personally have more faith in IBM.

Linux is dead

[approachingZero]

Long live FreeBSD

Re:Linux is dead

[Tuipveus]

Linux is like Cerberus, dog with many heads. You might be able to cut one head, but others will continue to work! Hmm, After thinking twice, *BSD is like three head Cerberus, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Linux has much more than 3 heads. :)

HAHAHAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

Good one!

RH/2 Warp 3.0!

[Quarters]

Now with Presentation Manager!

Re:RH/2 Warp 3.0!

[Freshly Exhumed]

But can nuns run it?

Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

for India!

At least it wasnt microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't trust ether of these 2 all that much, but I dont have the level of mistrust that i have with Microsoft.

accusative case?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't it be nova stella

BlueFedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Need i say more?

Bye Bye JBoss/WildFly

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live WebSphere?

Now watch

[TheDarkener]

Microsoft will next merge with IBM.

Think about it. Makes sense. Microsoft couldn't purchase Redhat directly, that would make too many people upset.

But if IBM purchases Redhat, then Microsoft purchases IBM, they get Redhat by proxy. Then they have what they want - direct control over one of the most important Linux distros in the world. That, along with Github, gives them a pretty strong position in the F/OSS ecosystem.

Re:Now watch

[Anonymous Coward]

People would drop RHEL like a hot potato then. I've already done so except for a few servers that require RHEL specifically. RHEL is too hard to run scientific software on after it's a year old. If I have to compile everything including three layers of dependencies, why not just use gentoo or debian if I want binaries? And no, Fedora is the exact opposite of stable, not just bleeding edge; they have in the past removed packages completely and "replaced" them with different packages in the repos, leading to brokenness. Sure, the new packages do the same thing, but they don't have the same binary names, parameters, and they don't get auto-installed on your system when the old packages are removed, so you have to go hunting for the competing software.

Re:Now watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Then Apple will buy Microsoft.

Re:Now watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft will next merge with IBM.

Think about it. Makes sense. Microsoft couldn't purchase Redhat directly, that would make too many people upset.

But if IBM purchases Redhat, then Microsoft purchases IBM, they get Redhat by proxy. Then they have what they want - direct control over one of the most important Linux distros in the world. That, along with Github, gives them a pretty strong position in the F/OSS ecosystem.

Microsoft is more likely to purchase Canonical/Ubuntu

... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Could've left away the "... at the company".
The whole point of holding and trading stock, interest, "intellectual property" and in fact, profit itself (as opposed to earned income), is that you do not have to work to take somebody else's money (or even to make money up on the spot, which is equal to lowering everyone's salary, and a form of inflation).

IMHO, it should be a crime, to have me working hard, and then somebody just making up those $1000 out of thin air, that he pays me with. (How banks and stocks work.) And it should also be a crime, when I worked hard for x hours to earn $1000, and somebody works much less than x hours, and much less hard, yet still expects to take my $1000 for it. (Aka profit.) Finally, it should definitely be a crime, if somebody did not work AT ALL, and only puts the result of his work on the copier, yet still expects money for it. ("intellectual property"... which already is the combination of two crimes: a monopoly, and artificial scarcity.)

Re:... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know these people drive better cars than you do, and do so for a reason. Think about that.

Re:... who do not work. Period.

[MightyYar]

Stock, interest, profit, and intellectual property are completely different concepts. That you conflate them all tells me all I need to know about your opinion. Hell, profit is just a math operation.

Re: ... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

All of that education and training and doctors dont make hundreds of times more than ditch diggers like C-level fucks and financial parasites do. I'm all for making bank, but come on...

Also, if a doctor kills their patient or a laborer hits a utility line with their shovel do they get a 7-8 figure bonus? Do they get a shiny cabinet appointment in government?

Re:... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're looking to get rid of is known as Fractional Reserve Banking.

Unfortunately, your side of the political spectrum is 100% in favor if it, as it is its lifeblood.

Re:... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes imbicile, the doctor is not a skilled worker but rather a limited tool. you can patch yourself up unless the law says you have to buy into the scheme; but no Doctors aren't hero's. They work. Just like shovel guy, The only difference is shovel guy knows where to hide a cocky doctor.

Re: ... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I need electrical work done I hire an electrician, for plumbing work a plumber, but for a heart bypass I should do it myself?

Re: ... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which side is that?

Re:... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude I saw a very small ditch be dug close to my home. They brought a fucking vehicle from Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors to do it in minutes pounding on the hard pavement. The guy was alone, too.

You have also mistaken a medical doctor for a professional sit on his ass stockholder. It's all too easy to do the latter. Have say 2 million dollars.. Use the first million dollars to have passive income enough to live on (I mean, even 2% over inflation will give $20K a year for life doing nothing). Use the other million dollars to trade stock or currencies and play Warren Buffet.

Re:... who do not work. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stock, Interest, profit and IP are just variations of using others people money/labor to increase your personal wealth and screw the people actually doing the work out of most, if not all, of the intrinsic wealth of their work/labor.

0.01% have been using the technique for thousands of years; nothing new to see here, move along...

Re:... who do not work. Period.

[MightyYar]

Stock is simply a form of ownership. I guess we could abolish joint ownership and just let wealthy families control everything like the good 'ol days. The part you hate about it (people making money by trading) is a feature, not a flaw. It's a system where human nature works for the common good. Yes, you have people playing the market, but in exchange for that behavior that you don't like, you get the much greater good of liquidity and access to vast amounts of capital. I can be a part-owner of any company I want - I don't have to be part of the royal court or landed gentry. I can get a small share of the exact same company that they can and benefit from its growth in a way that was inconceivable to my ancestors. Companies have access to a huge pile of cash without relying on a few big holders of capital. Which brings me to...

Interest. I voluntarily and happily pay interest on my home so that I'm building equity in something with real value rather than giving a landlord the bulk of my life's income. Yeah, the banker makes money from my labor. But so what? He makes a lot less than the landlord would if I didn't have access to capital. On the business side, businesses similarly can go to banks or the bond market to finance expansion. Yes, the bank or bondholders make a little off the top simply by possessing capital, but in exchange the business can make far more money and hire more workers.

In other words, you are listing only the bad things, which are an order of magnitude smaller than the good things that come with easier access to capital.

Look at countries which don't have agricultural futures markets. Farmers can't get a contract for their crops, and so are left guessing what the crop will be worth at the end of the year - far too late to make a decision. They would much rather trade a small amount of the total in exchange for an ability to plan ahead with a concrete price at the end of the season. Again, yes, someone is making money by simply having money - but the farmers do far better overall and it is easily worth the tradeoff.

Profit is literally a math equation and has nothing to do with screwing people out of anything.

IP... I'll grant you, that is a lot fuzzier. I think it probably has value in the short term, but we've let it get out of hand. It's hard to justify giving someone a government-granted monopoly for 100 years or so.

I'll add another to your list: the concept of limited liability in the form of corporations. This completely screws with the whole libertarian individual responsibility concept that our country was founded upon. I can understand not wanting Granny's assets in her retirement fund to be at risk when a company she owns does a Very Bad Thing, but it seems excessive to extend this protection to activist owners.

Consolidation sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope RHEL don't become like Rosetta.

Why all the hate?

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Count me as one of the people who *like* IBM. I was on board the OS/2 train for years until the company so badly mismanaged & mishandled it that they effectively surrendered to Microsoft. The software engineers at the company are top notch. I can only hope that upper management has learned a few lessons in the past twenty years.

Re:Why all the hate?

[cheesybagel]

They were top notch you mean. Current IBM management only knows about acquiring companies and outsourcing development work.

Re:Why all the hate?

[Gavrielkay]

I left IBM a little over 2 years ago after working there for 11 years. I don't think upper management at IBM is capable of learning anything. The current crop is all about cutting costs so that it looks like they might one day turn a profit. But they cut costs by getting rid of everyone who knew anything. There's no talent left to build or sell anything. Meanwhile, top executives rake in millions every year for steering the ship into the iceberg.

Re:Why all the hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Current IBM management only knows about acquiring companies and outsourcing development work.

Which in my experience accurately describes all large tech companies for the last 20 years.

IBM just has a headstart, but the last few companies I've worked for do the same thing.

Usually to the point of destroying the software they acquired, and then wondering why nobody wants it any more, or trying to force people to "upgrade" to a much shittier product which doesn't do half of what the acquired one does.

NIH can be brutal when companies figure it's just easier to remove competitors from the field. They take the IP, and then totally ruin the product they bought, frequently shuttering it within a year.

If IBM didn't screw things up

[raymorris]

> I can see it being in IBM's best interests to keep the RedHat model alive, maintaining a first class distribution and selling support to fund it.

Well yes, it would be in IBM's best interest to not destroy companies they buy. If they weren't stupid, they wouldn't do that.

Unfortunately history shows IBM does wreck companies that they buy.

IBM is quickly becoming Unisys

[Anonymous Coward]

RIP Red Hat

Re:I wonder if the recent attempt to purge Linus..

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try. OpenBSD is alive and well and is the premiere security research OS. OpenSSH, LibreSSL, pf and many others are all OpeBSD inventions and are used literally by billions of devices. Every router, every switch, every Linux distro, every BSD distro uses OpenSSH alone. Try again...

End of an era

[Anonymous Coward]

As a very early member of the Red Hat team, I feel a huge mix of emotions with this announcment. My years with Red Hat were amongst the most exciting and satisfying of my varied career as we built Red Hat and took it public. Red Hat's achievements since then have been huge - and their stock price reflects their success.

In those eary days, in the unlikely event that someone wanted to buy this upstart company that gave away its software, I doubt that the staff would have been on board with such a move. The company ethos was totally Open Source and there was a huge commitment to showing the world that Open Source did have a business model. I remember sitting at meeting with Sun (remember them?) as they tried to shoehorn their non-Open Source Java on to the Red Hat Linux distribution CD. Their senior management could not believe that Red Hat was refusing - and was prepared fund the writing of a truly open alternative!

Things are different now. Red Hat is a key part of an enterprise IT system rather than an unproven upstart. I have read the comments about this being the end of Red Hat as we know it, but it is worth remembering that the Red Hat as I remember it disappeared years ago. Things change and that does not necessarily mean for the worse. I admit to having reservations about the IBM acquisition, but it is also a significant opportunity for Red Hat to leverage itself in the enterprise space.

I hope it all goes well and I look forward to reading about Red Hat's continuing success.

Re:End of an era

[d3vi1]

Among some of my clients, I administer the UNIX infrastructure of a small Telecom operator. They have about 100 Linux Servers running RHEL, JBoss EAP, FreeIPA, CloudForms, Satellite, etc. This costs about €40k/year. The alternative from Oracle would have been €500k with their incredibly bad support.

I remember being excited when Oracle bought Sun. SUNW was running out of cash, but they had a spectacularly good software portfolio with ZFS, DTrace, Comstar, etc. It all went bust. Solaris hasn't seen any innovation in 10 years.

Suddenly SuXE is starting to look good again.

Re:End of an era

[Anonymous Coward]

The solaris developers were all laid off ages ago. This was news. Don't hold your breath waiting for another release.

IBM will own Gnome and systemd

[danbuter]

The guys directly responsible for Gnome and systemd will be IBM employees very shortly. This will be interesting.

Re:IBM will own Gnome and systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as we send the systemd team to an Indian hellhole I'm happy. If IBM wanted to get some karma points from the hard core Linux community they would ditch systemd ASAP and make CentOS 8 a refresh of CentOS 6.

Re:IBM will own Gnome and systemd

[hcs_$reboot]

These guys were not RH employees, in the first place..

Re: Pay your licensing fee

[Anonymous Coward]

"cock smoking teabaggers" not "maggot" you newfag

Welcome to Big Purple Hat

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

What do you get when you add a Red Hat to Big Blue? You get a big purple hat, obviously. I wonder if they're thinking of adding an ostrich feather? Heheheh

Re:Welcome to Big Purple Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the number one mack daddy of Heimlich County!

The end of Redhat's anti-patent stance

[Tough Love]

So much for Redhat's fight against software patents, IBM is the biggest patent troll of them all. Traditionally goes easy on open source projects but some flipping idiot might decide at any time that monetizing patents is the new get rich quick scheme of the month.

Re:The end of Redhat's anti-patent stance

[AnalogDiehard]

IBM is the biggest patent troll of them all. Traditionally goes easy on open source projects but some flipping idiot might decide at any time that monetizing patents is the new get rich quick scheme of the month.

How quickly you forget that IBM, Red Hat, and Novell teamed to soundly defeat the much hated copyright troll SCO over Unix/Linux Copyright Disputes

Re:The end of Redhat's anti-patent stance

[Areyoukiddingme]

How quickly you forget that IBM, Red Hat, and Novell teamed to soundly defeat the much hated copyright troll SCO over Unix/Linux Copyright Disputes

Copyrights are not patents. IBM files scads of useless patents. They also do some genuine R&D, but its buried under mounds of useless bullshit these days.

Super!

[Nethead]

Now maybe I'll be able to run Domino in 64 bit on Linux without IBM hardware.

It was systemd. IBM had to have it.

[Anonymous Coward]

$34 billion for systemd.

Next, IBM will buy APK for $13 billion.

Bad things come in threes

[HanzoSpam]

First systemd.
Then a CoC.
Now Borged by IBM.

They'll probably be ok for a few years. Watch for the rebranding. When they start calling it IBM Enterprise Linux, you'll know they've been throughly assimilated. Then after about five years of steady market decline, it'll just quietly disappear.

Re:Bad things come in threes

[Kohlrabi82]

If GNOME and systemd disappear with them, all the better for the Linux eco system.

Please seek help of a mental health professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Not every damned thing is about your personal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Nearly two years is a very long tiime for a case of temporary insanity to rage on.

Normal people can read a tech news story and not immediately see it as pro-Trump or anti-Trump; indeed normal people read such a story without the name Trump going through their minds at all.

Cloud = Puff of Smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Re:Pay your licensing fee

[red crab]

Footnote: $699 License Fee applies to your systemP server running RHEL 7 with 4 cores activated for one year. To activate additional processor cores on the systemP server, a fee of $199 per core applies. systemP offers a new Semi-Activation Mode now. In systemP Semi-Activation Mode, you will be only charged for all processor calls exceeding 258 MIPS, which will be processed by additional semi-activated cores on a pro-rata basis. RHEL on systemP servers also offers a Partial Activation Mode, where additional cores can be activated in Inhibited Efficiency Mode. To know more about Semi-Activation Mode, Partial Activation Mode and Inhibited Efficiency Mode, visit http://www.ibm.com/systemp or contact your IBM systemP Sales Engineer.

Hahaha Oracle's Fucked

[Anonymous Coward]

What will their Linux group do now that they can no longer steal Red Hat's patches and slap a new name on the resulting product?

Re:Hahaha Oracle's Fucked

[hcs_$reboot]

CentOS (free) == RH

Re:Hahaha Oracle's Fucked

[Anonymous Coward]

steal

You don't understand RH's licensing, do you?

Does IBM still have engineers?

[rsilvergun]

the last I heard they'd gotten rid of most of them to focus on being a contractor company that doles out H1-Bs. I'm not saying that facetiously, it was big news several years back when they said they were going to back off new tech to focus on being a "consultancy firm"; and it was no secret their "consultants" were all folks on work visas.

I know they've got some engineers around for vanity projects like Big Blue, but is there any real tech (of the sort that is meant to become a product in the next 3-5 years) coming out of them like there is with say Intel, AMD, ARM? I guess if they're buying Red Hat that'll change, assuming they don't just gut the company...

Re:Does IBM still have engineers?

[The Evil Atheist]

As far as I know, IBM in the UK is still doing quality work. And allowed to do quality work.

This happened to Rare when Microsoft bought them

[rsilvergun]

everyone who could jump ship did with the result being that Microsoft got nothing of value when all was said and done. All it took was one game (Grabbed by the Ghoulies) and folks knew Rare was toast.

By Neruos

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud, what a joke.

Gee

[the_archer666]

Here I was, trying out some new stuff which didn't work on my Ubuntu test system. Manager looks over my shoulder and asked what it takes to get the thing running, to which I replied "we need to buy Redhat". Guess I should have added "licences".

Oh the twits!

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have bought Ubuntu and then invested a billion in it.

IBM is mixed

[jd]

They contributed JFS and ported DB/2. They ported Linux to their mainframes and ran the first Linux TV ads. During a superbowl, I think.

On the other hand, their maintenance of these projects, other than their mainframe, has been limited.

Breaking News!

[hcs_$reboot]

Real news is: wow! IBM has $34b!

Re:Breaking News!

[Anonymous Coward]

No. IBM is borrowing the money from Merrill Lynch BofA to make the purchase. MLBA is also the M&A advisor so they are making that fee as well. Pretty sweet deal.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Well at least it't not Microsoft buying Red Hat..

Linus got richer?

[carnivore302]

I wonder how many shares one Linus T. still has? When red hat first went public they gave him a significant amount of shares. As a thank you of sorts. It would be well deserved if he got seriously wealthy from this take-over.

Re:Pay your licensing fee

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM may be moving to a broader lower end market with this acquisition. If so they should release a SystemX. Stuff with an X sells, the more X the better.

Novell is not SCO

[jjohn_h]

The UNIX code belonged to Novell not to SCO. SCO had nothing else than hot air and bluff. Or so the courts decided without consulting you.

Poor Red Hat workers

[DrXym]

Sucked into the alternate reality of IBM - software and processes everyone hates, petty bureaucracy, and layoffs.

Re:I wonder if the recent attempt to purge Linus..

[Anonymous Coward]

As a viable operating system OpenBSD is dead. It doesn't even show up on Netcraft's survey of installed servers. Even FreeBSD shows up at about 1%, and we all know FreeBSD is used 1000 times as much as OpenBSD. Nice try, but naming random softwares does not an operating sytem make.

Fact: OpenBSD is D E A D.

Oracle/Ubuntu

[theshowmecanuck]

So now how soon will Oracle buy Ubuntu?

Seppuku

[Anonymous Coward]

If RedHat wanted t commit suicide, we could have found a less painful way for them to do it. I mean they want to make amends for Lenanrt Pottering and all, but really?

Nothing good can come from this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm done with Redhat. I will make make best effort to get my company to adopt Debian/Ubuntu

IBM and their past failures

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody here is old enough to remember the project between IBM and SCO (do any of you remember the evil Daryl McBride) to port Linux to their mainframe. It was IBM's abandonment of the project and their release of the software into the public community that stirred the anger in SCO and prompted the lawsuit. In fact, IBM was named as a defendant in that suit. Nobody here remembers the SCO lawsuit that claimed Linux infringed on their Unix copyright? You have IBM to thank for that cluster fsck.

Re:Pay your licensing fee

[Anonymous Coward]

I am running OpenSuse on my P7. For virtualization I am using native IBM Power virtualization. My website is www.nfnnet.org
If you want to stream my SDR weather station it's www2.nfnnet.org:8073
My son gave me the p720 for a fathers day gift. I'm sure IBM bought Redhat to try to get a piece of the action and charge a yearly subscription.
Due to the nature of the GPL I doubt IBM will be able to squash the free distributions of Linux for the Power platform.

Bye Bye Centos...

[Anonymous Coward]

And since RedHat has a lock on government Linux we're going to be paying through the
nose for it now.

no great loss, Redhat was already Redmond #2

[Anonymous Coward]

more licensing to pile on top of an already bad licensed software stack...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

BBB

[Anonymous Coward]

$34b for a company that consults and sells free software being bought by a company that consults and can download the source code to the software for free? Am I missing something?

It's a bit hard for IBM to make money when it sells its productive modern divisions.

Wrong.

[brunes69]

See Q3 earnings.

Cognitive Solutions (Software) $4.4B
Global Business Services (Consulting & Outsourcing) $4.1B
Technology Services (S/W Services) & Cloud $8.5B.

IBM makes more money via S/W than consulting. And Cloud matches both combined.

SCO can sue them again

[jfdavis668]

This gives SCO another good opportunity to sue IBM again.

HOLY SNIKES BATMAN

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is going to pay $34B for a company with a market cap of $20B. That is nearly a 60% premium. That sort of fiscal stupidity has been rare since the boom of the 1990s.

Re:How many companies has IBM destroyed or let die

[Anonymous Coward]

I can think of two: Lotus Development and ROLM Telecom. Readers can probably name others. Will Red Hat be next? Depends how much they leave Red Hat alone, but I'm not betting they'll do that.

Cognos. I used to work for them, worked for IBM for a short while after acquisition as well and blue washing. Watched as all development got ripped out, all QA got shipped to India, and IBM had no clue what to do with the product afterwards beside keep cutting and rebranding. Then slapping their other products into it and calling it something else.

5 million RHT shares are shorted

[EzInKy]

I hate to see anybody lose money, so to all those glorious warriors who keep the markets in check by betting on failure I offer my sincere condolences! A $70 loss per share has got to sting.

worst news in tech this year

[Anonymous Coward]

Then RedHat is dead for me. There are two companies I do not want to deal with - IBM and Oracle. We freed ourselves from any IBM product and are on the way to phase out oracle. This deal is a kick to the balls for us... we really hate dealing with both of these companies.... I hoped IBM was dying, unfortunately it is not the case...

SMIT for RHEL

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of comments about AIX. So I'm just getting a funny picture in my head of running SMIT or SMITTY to manage RHEL, lol. Not sure that is totally a bad thing tho, as long as its just a front end to the existing tools like yum, etc.

I'm not sure how I feel about IBM, but I never disliked AIX. It was an odd beast but once I got used to it I didn't dislike it. Granted it has been 10 years since I managed an AIX system.

A little reality here...

[whitroth]

1. Ignoring the political posts, I skimmed past a log o folks who I'll bet $5 don't use Linux, and never have.
2. IBM's contributed a *lot* to Linux and o/s.
3. I've said for almost 20 years that Linux was IBM's silver bullet all along: I mean, really, would *yuo* want to support system/36 (bet there's still some running), system/38, AS4000, RISC 69000, AIX, DOS/VSE/SP/whateverotherlettershavebeenadded, MVS.... or Linux? "Sure, folks, you say your company has grown, and needs more power? Buy our next size up computer... and the worst you have to do with all the software you're running is recompile; everything else will just *run*"
4. Finally, it could have been far, far worse: It could have been MS, or Apple, or (horrors) Oracle that bought it.

GCC is now in the hands of IBM, and Clang Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least we still got Emacs.

I just sent $100 to the GNU/HURD project

[1steve1]

I'm unemployed, I have shares of red hat, which now will keep me going for about 7 months more of being unemployed. I just sent the FSF $100 for HURD development. This has to stop, Linux is finished now.

Remember what the acronym IBM represents...

[JimboWTF1360]

I've Been Mislead

IBM is not interested in RHEL product

[Anonymous Coward]

they buy a customer portfolio. Large customers that cannot easily switch to another product stack.

Industrial is most intuitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Read your username and then practice it. "Industrial design" is the most intuitive thing you can design. It has to be dumbed down to 2 switches and 3 lights or your minimum wage dropouts can't operate the machine. I agree with your apple hate, but don't put this shit on engineering.

I guess I'll be able to continue using RHEL

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm currently an IBM employee and have been running RHEL (which is the officially supported Linux deskrop distro within IBM) for years. The last time I was due for a new laptop, I had the option of a ThinkPad with Windows, a ThinkPad with Linux, or a Macbook Pro, however when one of my co-workers was recently due for his, the only option available was the Macbook Pro (he didn't want to switch from Windows). But with this acquisition, I'll likely be able to once again choose Linux for my next laptop, so that makes me happy.

Summary

[DarthVain]

Cloud dur Cloud cloud, cloudy McCloudsalot. Cloudry cloud re-cloud cloudology. Cloud. Cloud. Cloud. Hurpaderp der cloudy cloud. Bort! Bort! Bort!

Cloud.... Cloud. Cloud...............Cloud.

Cloud.

Don't forget Eclipse

[Anonymous Coward]

RAD is a premium product based on Eclipse. IBM *gave Eclipse to the open source community.*

Anyone who thinks IBM takes more than they give to open source simply doesn't know of IBM's contributions.

Re: Pay your licensing fee

[Anonymous Coward]

No it went like this

Heading: Don't forget...

Body: to pay your $699 licencing fee you cock smoking teabaggers!

Idiot