Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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"
I think it's more for Red Hat's cloud infrastructure, than the Linux distro itself.
The next version will be branded IBM(R) SystemD/2.
Henceforth, it’ll be known as “Big Blue Hat”.
#DeleteChrome
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Nuh uh, look at the market share of OS/2 and AIX. /s
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.
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.
Look on the bright side: Poettering works for Red Hat. (Reposting because apparently Poettering has mod points.)
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.
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
You forgot Oracle.
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.
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.
"... 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.
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.
Real news is: wow! IBM has $34b!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The core CentOS leadership are now Red Hat employees. They're not clear of nor uninvolved in this purchase.
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.