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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.
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.
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.
#DeleteChrome
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)
"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.........
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.
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.)
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.
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.