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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.
Why not start your own distro instead? Buy some clients? What for?
And good luck getting the putrid poettering putty out of everything.
I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
decent businesses always getting bought out by some behemoth and eventually becoming junk?
Tivoli Linux is the best Linux.
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?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
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.
Look on the bright side: Poettering works for Red Hat.
The next version will be branded IBM(R) SystemD/2.
Henceforth, it’ll be known as “Big Blue Hat”.
#DeleteChrome
Probably.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
the possibilities ... OS/2 compatibility, Presentation Manager instead of Gnome/KDE, systemd for AIX?
Kanga: That's not a fish, that's a bird.
Pooh: Yes, but is it a starling or a mackeral?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Oh, wait, /. is a US joint. Ok, forget about what I said.
And now attention: ... :-)
Getting modded into earths core in 3,2,1
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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..
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Nuh uh, look at the market share of OS/2 and AIX. /s
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.
Given that IBM is more interested in providing services I would expect them to just stop CentOS and make RHEL free.
Red Hat hired the CentOS developers 4.5-years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Lennart already fucked up RHEL, I hope IBM will get rid of him and systemd.
Look on the bright side: Poettering works for Red Hat. (Reposting because apparently Poettering has mod points.)
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.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
+1
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
With systemd how can they fuck it up worse than it already is?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
All these lamentations! But this might be the opening we need to kill systemd!
Long live FreeBSD
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
Now with Presentation Manager!
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.
for India!
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.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.)
Indeed. Maybe they will even sack Poettering. If so, they will do a ton of good.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
ah - Red Hat was founded in Raleigh NC and their headquarters are still there. Last I heard Raleigh NC is on the East Coast
The guys directly responsible for Gnome and systemd will be IBM employees very shortly. This will be interesting.
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.
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
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Now maybe I'll be able to run Domino in 64 bit on Linux without IBM hardware.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
$34 billion for systemd.
Next, IBM will buy APK for $13 billion.
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.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
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.
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?
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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".
"... 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.
Don't you mean the repackagers?
CentOS developers were always RedHat. That's the point.
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.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Real news is: wow! IBM has $34b!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
Please login to access my lawn
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.
Well wave good bye. IBM will fly it to Bangalore just as soon as they can find the planes to do it.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
Sucked into the alternate reality of IBM - software and processes everyone hates, petty bureaucracy, and layoffs.
The core CentOS leadership are now Red Hat employees. They're not clear of nor uninvolved in this purchase.
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.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
So now how soon will Oracle buy Ubuntu?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
This gives SCO another good opportunity to sue IBM again.
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.
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.
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.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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?
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.
You're being pedantic.
I've Been Mislead
Scientific Linux is already this and very similar to CentOS, owned/administrated by Lawrence Livermore Labs.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Hear, hear.
Sorry. Can't do that. My system runs pulseaudio.
Nonaggression works!
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.)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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.
Where is the "+1 Terrifying" mod when you need it?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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.
Ken
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.
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.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon