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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.
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.
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.
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.
I stole this Sig
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.
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.
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.
Lennart already fucked up RHEL, I hope IBM will get rid of him and systemd.
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.
You forgot Oracle.
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...
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.
The core CentOS leadership are now Red Hat employees. They're not clear of nor uninvolved in this purchase.