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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.

9 of 398 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Damn. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent by quantaman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  3. Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent by infolation · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re: Damn. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re: Please God No by wyattstorch516 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re: It all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  7. Re: Damn. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Lol by cheesybagel · · Score: 4, Informative

    You forgot Oracle.

  9. Re:Please God No by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Informative

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