Fuck. RH seemed like a good company, and for it to go into a slow wasting death at IBM is a bummer.

Unless the leadership happens to hold quite a lot of shares, their stance isn’t going to matter too much.

&quot;those in charge have basically given up&quot;Yes but which company&#x27;s leadership has given up? If this is the ordinary acquisition model, where the buying company (IBM) leadership stays in charge, then I say it&#x27;s Red Hat&#x27;s leadership that&#x27;s given up. If it&#x27;s the &#x27;buy a company to get an entirely new leadership team&#x27; then it means those in charge of IBM might actually understand their dire situation. But I have no idea if they have that awareness.

My perception is that IBM (and HP, Oracle, etc) will buy a product company, and then IBM-ify it, and then just sit on that product for years with minimal improvements.That is my fear for Red Hat. Successful product companies are hungry - IBM is not.

My last startup, blekko, was acquired by IBM in 2015. They treated our people well; many of them still work there.It takes 6 months to be acquired by IBM, so I don&#x27;t think recent stock market gyrations have anything to do with it.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;about&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;ibm-acquire-red-hat-completely-changing-cloud-landscape-and-becoming-world%E2%80%99s-1-hybrid-cloud-provider" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;about&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;ibm-acquire-r...</a>&quot;- IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community- Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team&quot;

Now official! It&#x27;s at $190&#x2F;share vs Friday&#x27;s $116.68 close<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com</a>

Red Hat tends to employ people through offices in low&#x2F;moderate COL areas or as fully remote. It would have been my #1 prospect after leaving the Bay Area. People who&#x27;ve already established lives in places like Raleigh may not find a comparable job so easily.

I&#x27;ve really got to wonder at the people who would stay at a company that treated them like utter garbage ... especially if they&#x27;re experienced ... and especially in this job market.

They didn&#x27;t fire theirs - they ordered them to move to an arbitrary office, most commonly not the closest geographically either, without relocation money. If you didn&#x27;t move, it was considered a voluntary departure. There was often no room at these offices even for the minority who accepted the moves.It was&#x2F;is a deliberate attempt to dispose of senior, less portable people without having to pay layoff charges.Who needs fusion power when you can run off the Watsons spinning in their graves at relativistic velocity?

Yes.  It will take some time but I&#x27;d take an exit package and find a new job.

Red Hat has a significant remote workforce. IBM famously fired theirs. Can we expect IBM to do the same to Red Hat&#x27;s?

Hoping this is false! IBM is the worst of acquirers and they treat their people like utter garbage, especially the more experienced ones.If there&#x27;s any truth to this, it means those in charge have basically given up - assuming growth is capped and&#x2F;or that the big return of a buyout premium would counter recent stock pricing setbacks.(Update: now officially announced!)

However nice their open source work is, RH licensing is already every bit as scummy as the others, at least if my coworkers in the department I used to work for are to be believed. Bait and switch freebies, &quot;we need to run this sketchy shell script on your production system to determine how much money you owe us&quot; nonsense, coming back with a ludicrously inaccurate bill that has to be argued over point-by-point with lawyers, the works.

When IBM bought Informix they replaced competent database support with aggressive DB2 marketing droids and presented us with an annual bill sixty times more than Informix had charged.

I have extensive dealings with both.Oracle are actually malicious. IBM are just incompetent.If you can find a good account manager inside IBM for your needs, then there is a chance that you&#x27;ll be able to get on well. Otherwise you&#x27;ll have to do what I did which is say publicly shame the head of department on a public platform, with their superiors listening in.Oracle however, have no shame.

It&#x27;s worse, IMHO. IBM treats their customers as prey just like Oracle plus they treat their own people worse. I know people who&#x27;ve had the IBM licensing ninja squad show up at their door for surprise validation with a big bill as a result.

There is also the big difference that Sun was in the middle of transitioning to open source company (almost begrudgingly I think after everything else had failed), they weren&#x27;t the great friend of open source they now are remembered as at their peak of their success. Sun still held significant amount of proprietary IP when they were acquired. In comparison RH has been open source from the get go, and pretty much everything they have is open source.

The alienate and destroy part is likely. Very different situations otherwise.Sun was essentially a dead shell that still held a few valuable pieces when Oracle purchased them. Overall the business was in terminal decline.Red Hat, while wildly overvalued (as many things are&#x2F;were in this bubble market), has a consistently growing business that is on good footing overall.Their prior four fiscal year sales figures: $1.7b, $2b, $2.4b, $2.9bThey look like they could do $3.4b in sales for fiscal 2019.Their profitability is mildly lacking and combined with their modest growth doesn&#x27;t come close to supporting their extreme valuation (much less when the stock was 50% higher). It&#x27;s not surprising the board might sell the company here, the stock market bubble is likely nearing an end, with interest rates rising or a recession coming up next (either of which guarantee it&#x27;s over). Red Hat may not see much higher than this market cap for another decade - assuming continued modest growth - if they were valued at a more sane level.Red Hat is riding relatively high. Sun was on its last legs as an independent entity. Red Hat very clearly does not need to sell here, if they do it&#x27;s simply the board taking what is an extraordinary price (would have to guess the deal will value them at 60 to 80 times idealized 2018 earnings).

Love it. Gotta ask though - is that guy on meth or something? Hour long speech at top speed...

Can&#x27;t mention Oracle&#x2F;Sun without linking to this amazing rant:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=2047" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&amp;feature=youtu.be...</a>

Is this event comparable to when Oracle bought Sun? Should we expect IBM to rip RH apart and alienate all existing customers?

Wow, if this is true, my condolences.  I was a former IBMer and Red Hat folks, your world is about to be turned upside down.

I see IBM as being worse than MS as a company. They have steadily imploded over the last 20 years.

I&#x27;m not sure Amazon would be worse than the likes of bloodsucking PE (private equity) owning Suse.

I don&#x27;t want Google or Amazon anywhere near Canonical.

What makes you think the poster thinks of it as a good thing?

Maybe Google or Amazon will buy Canonical soon?What makes you think that would be a good thing?

Second that.Half a year ago I was still at RedHat, and we were joking around with colleagues, that either the big bet on OpenShift&#x2F;kubernetes starts paying off, or somebody buys us.We joked that Microsoft under Satya Nadella would actually be quite a good fit :D

Microsoft would have actually been better. They&#x27;re at least still a product development company. IBM at this point is just consultants and their sales ilk. They&#x27;ll gut Red hat.

I&#x27;d place my bets that MS would buy Canonical since they already have a relationship.

Why do they need to sell it to begin with?

The only positive side I can think of is that, Microsoft did not buy RH before IBM does.This is a threat to OSS, sadly.Maybe Google or Amazon will buy Canonical soon?

Red Hat is a lot more than the distros, isn&#x27;t it?

You&#x27;ll see a lot of preconfigured CentOS images, not RHEL because of the licensing. Red Hat&#x27;s recent (and sensible) play has been on-prem Kubernetes with OpenShift.

&gt; Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention.Ubuntu don&#x27;t have JBoss or OpenShift, amongst other things. Neither do SuSE, unfortunately.

RH back in the day made a lot of hay by being the go-to option for enterprises migrating proprietary UNIX workloads to x86+Linux. But I guess that market is mostly saturated by now.What I worry about is not the fate of RHEL per se, in the end it&#x27;s just a distro among others. What I worry about, as a huge FOSS fan, is the fate of RH engineering which is certainly one of the biggest individual upstream FOSS contributors on a lot of places in the stack. By comparison, the Canonical engineering team is absolutely puny. If the work that RH does disappears, we&#x27;re going to see a lot slower progress in the FOSS ecosystem.

Ubuntu has a long way to go before they reach Red Hat levels of quality assurance.

Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Every new cloud thing touted its pre-configured Ubuntu images, for example. Even Microsoft started with Ubuntu with WSL.Maybe that&#x27;s why a still multi-billion dollar company decided to cash out even as Linux seems to be making inroads. People used Red Hat for the same reason they used IBM: it was corporate, understood corporate needs, and knew how to serve them. Now it seems like corporations are offloading IT to AWS and friends with Ubuntu.Everyone talks about what Canonical did for the desktop while missing what they did for friendly apt-based Linux on the server with SLAs and LTSes and support contracts from a company that speaks corporation.And if all the paying customers switch to Debian-based distributions...The writing is on the wall.

RHEL is just a small piece of the Red Hat puzzle that is sold to enterprises. In some way Red Hat is an exception -- there have been no multi-billion dollar businesses built purely on open source except them. (Or maybe I have missed something.)

Well yeah, there&#x27;s CentOS, so a company just needs to step up and provide the level of support RHEL customers expect.I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in.I really don&#x27;t understand this acquisition.

At least they didn&#x27;t get bought by Oracle. All the important people Sun had left within ~6 months of Oracle buying Sun.

RedHat can be replicated.  Not cheap, and it will take a few years.  What do I mean?  Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly.  Customers will experience vendor hate to a high degree.  But, RH is based on open source.  A replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.

This is terrible news. I hope its not true.

Wow this would be a very expensive purchase for IBM , redhat is currently worth about 20% of IBM&#x27;s market cap

Plus the wonderful 401k match once a year plus the &quot;colocation&quot; scandal etc, etc.

RedHat had a good reputation as a place to work. Meanwhile, when I worked at IBM my health insurance contribution for a family of four was $1k a month

Now official - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en</a>

Big if true&gt;bloomberg.comif true

Now I wonder who will buy Canonical. If&#x2F;when Shuttleworth will be tired of running it I assume it also will happen. Maybe Microsoft to continue their open-source hat-trick.

Good news for Canonical&#x2F;Ubuntu I guess? I wonder how Linux distro popularity will plot out in next few months.

Not sure it is time to run yet, but I enjoy using Ubuntu Mate.  Xubuntu is a low mem choice as well.

I also use this, and memory footprint is ~100MiB, mostly on the Xorg side. i3 itself + various other components is ~20MiB total.

As for alternate Linux distributions, I don&#x27;t know how similar you want to stay to Fedora, but my current setup would surely conform to your stated requirements: Arch linux, with i3 as window manager. I use st as my terminal emulator. All together, the memory footprint is minimal, and it makes my not-all-that-low laptop specs shine far more than a heavier distribution would have.If you want something similar to Fedora, dunno. I believe the desktop interface is a big part of the memory usage of most distributions, so unless I&#x27;m mistaken in that, wanting low memory usage as well as a nice interface is going to be difficult.

&gt; Any thoughts on an alternate OSUbuntu, Debian, Arch? (Or Endless if you want something OSTree&#x2F;Flatpak-based like Fedora Silverblue.)&gt; with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora?Anything not GNOME? Not being (too) snarky — GNOME uses a lot of memory, although I&#x27;ve read they&#x27;re making some progress recently. Even KDE these days is pretty low in memory usage by default.

KDE&#x27;s memory footprint on boot decreased to 400MB or less.

Yeah, Silverblue is just starting to be really nice. :&#x2F;

If you think IBM are going to keep Red Hat&#x27;s commitments to Fedora or CentOS going you are in for a rude surprise.

NixOS is interesting but certainly not the easiest migration, it&#x27;s a very different way of administering your system. That said, this might be what I chose to do now.

NixOS maybe? Don&#x27;t know about memory footprint, but as a fellow fedora laptop user, I find this distro the most appealing to switch to (arch being the other option, but too high maintenance for my taste).

I wouldn’t say that OpenBSD is friendly on laptops, especially on laptops made in the past five years or so.

Why not consider Open or NetBSD? They can make nice desktops, and OpenBSD is very friendly on laptops. And they are lighter than Fedora and perform much better. And, they use a maximally free license, but this is simply my preference. You may feel different.

I use Fedora Linux on my laptop. What does this mean for the Fedora Project? Any thoughts on an alternate OS with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora? It takes about 1 GB to boot up Fedora 27 now.And what&#x27;s the future for CentOS?

I&#x27;m a fan of Red Hat. I am a Red Hat Certified Engineer and contemplating working towards the architect certification. When I heard they aquired the company behind Ansible a few years ago I was excited.If this deal goes through I&#x27;ll be super disappointed.

Terrible news for scientific computing :(

This is the most positive comment I&#x27;ve seen in this thread. To the extent that the ensuing development effort finds bugs in container orchestration systems, creates new features, creates new abilities to manage services on &quot;hybrid&quot; private-cloud-plus-mainframe systems, helps to modernize old-school businesses that run infrastructure the global economy relies upon... this could actually be a very good thing for open source and future investment therein. Skepticism is healthy and warranted, but this could be a good match.

It&#x27;s also worth pointing out that Red Hat (and Big Banks) have been desperately trying to train new mainframe operators with limited success due to the shift to distributed, to the extent that they&#x27;ve even been giving  money to select colleges specifically to develop mainframe-centric curriculum.

As a Red Hat employee (opinions my own, not Red Hat&#x27;s, etc) and though not involved in any discussions like this, I can see some potential for it being a good move. There&#x27;s a lot of work being done to a) move things from mainframe to distributed and b) help people squeeze the last bits of utility out of their mainframes. That requires knowledge on both sides of the house.The world is going to open-source distributed systems built on commodity hardware, which Red Hat has done a great job of building a business model around. For old established companies, though, the migration is a lot of work, and there are _definitely_ still plenty of large companies who have purchased&#x2F;leased mainframes for long periods of time, and would like to modernize, but also can&#x27;t afford to throw everything away and rebuild from scratch. There&#x27;s a lot of work being done already between the two companies to run Go, Docker, Kubernetes, etc, on mainframe, and for companies with mainframe resources, being able to get a little more utility out of those sunk costs is very attractive, and something Red Hat&#x27;s expertise has (and would continue to, presumably) help accomplish.That being said, I&#x27;m pretty surprised at the news, and I&#x27;ll be watching closely to see how things go.

It&#x27;s very unlikely, having been through a ton of m&#x2F;as on a lot of sides.

An an IBM employee, I definitely hope that some of the RH culture rubs off on us, but I also hope that RH retains its own distinctive identity and isn&#x27;t altered very much by the deal aside from having access to IBM&#x27;s resources such as the scale of the sales organisation.

I have some hopes that Red Hat has a strong-enough future value for IBM that we end up redefining IBM rather than the other way round. There are precedents, notably the Apple&#x2F;NeXT merger. Today&#x27;s Apple is 95% NeXT and 5% old Apple. Can this happen here? Time will tell.

There cannot be a single Red Hat employee outside of RH&#x27;s board of directors that thinks this would be a good move for Red Hat.

This has been my experience too, and not when it was released. I was playing with some of their APIs last month and it was horrible: CORS issues, high latency, random failures or server errors for no reason.

I worked for a company that used bluemix PAAS (cloudfoundry based back in 2016). 
We were early adopters(customers), the service was not really stable at that time (but we were not in production yet) but it improved and ended up quite stable before we left for different reasons. I think I preferred (cost aside) their PAAS offering to some competitors like AWS beanstalk.

Tried IBM cloud when it was &quot;released&quot;.50% of the portal pages were failing due to their own cross origin policies.Only a idiot would touch such an incompetent cloud system.

This will only work out if IBM beefs up it&#x27;s data centers to clone AWS (Lambda, Batch, S3, RDS, SQS, Fargate), gobbles Netifly, then puts mainframe DB2 in the cloud next to commodity servers. Also needs to open the ZOS toolchain and get a modern syntax and tooling around COBOL.

Well, I can easily imagine something worse, like for example Oracle buying it... ^__^;

Oh shit. This is one of the worst things I can imagine.

Sure, those are the ones having to sell their shares to IBM, but IBM would pay a premium and before anouncement discuss with key investors.

For a large public corporation usually a clear majority of shares are held as pure investment by big institutional investors like pension companies. Their goal is to turn a small amount of money into a large amount of money without too much risk. So they have no reason to block this sort of deal.Moreover, such companies are often desperate to minimise overheads on operations. Once upon a time they&#x27;d employ dozens of specialists, now they&#x27;re relying on computer models as much as possible to reduce costs and don&#x27;t much care about what&#x27;s actually driving the price changes that the model is looking at.Boards at big companies actually now know this. Suppose you&#x27;re the board of a big corp and you&#x27;d like $10M each even though you didn&#x27;t do a good job? Just write up paperwork saying you propose that you get paid $10M extra each because of diddly-dee, put it up for a vote by shareholders with a recommendation that they vote &quot;Yes&quot;. A few smaller shareholders are paying attention, they&#x27;ll vote &quot;No&quot;. The big institutions are entirely on auto-pilot, and will follow your &quot;Yes&quot; recommendation, your vote passes, you now get $10M with no effort. Giving the board a pile of money for no reason might bankrupt the company. Not your problem, the shareholders voted for it.For the pension company making your shareholders $10 and then asking for $1 to cover overheads from actual specialists (10%) is seen as worse than making your shareholders $8 and then asking for 10¢ to cover overheads from a few pencil pushers (1.25%) even though in the first scenario the shareholder kept $9 and in the second they only got $7.90. Nobody wants to pay 10%. The result was foreseeable but it&#x27;s hard to say if it could have been prevented.The Red Hat board will recommend shareholders accept the offer. Big institutions will (and in this case in my opinion quite rightly) automatically agree and so it doesn&#x27;t matter what a handful of small private shareholders do.

&gt; Can&#x27;t think of any company I&#x27;d want less to be a steward of CentOS upstreamOracle

RIP Red Hat Linux.Can&#x27;t think of any company I&#x27;d want less to be a steward of CentOS upstream.Looks like Ubuntu is about to get much more serious consideration for production workloads.

Dupe <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18321937" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18321937</a>

That&#x27;s a positive scenario but I don&#x27;t see Ginni Rometty relinquishing control voluntarily. The IBM board has given no signs of dissatisfaction with her performance.

use the IBM sales org, with the RH leadership ;-)

Oracle sales means promising everything and delivering half of that at best.  Are you sure you want to use that as an example?

Ugh I hate their sales. There was a day they decided to spam my cell phone number constantly while I was on lunch. Not even sure how they got it, but I finally answered and got super angry with the other end. I didn’t even know it was Red Hat because they didn’t even bother leaving messages. Just back to back to back times 4 calls. Even if it were my work number, if you didn’t get through the first time, spamming my line isn’t going to get you there either.

&gt; PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?Purple hat.

Given that IBM are after the tech and will probably reject the culture (as also happened when Oracle ate Sun), I suggest an appropriate name would be...Old Hat (tm);)

No one beats Oracle at sales, they are a sales organization; they just happen to be selling software.

RH are good at a LOT of things but sales remains a bit of a weak point compared to Oracle and to a lesser degree IBM.Hopefully the RH guys can bring back a focus on technology to IBM while IBM figure out how to sell it to customers.PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?

The only effective way for this to work is for RedHat to be an independent company

I work in HPC, and, well, it&#x27;s VERY hard to make a good profit there.- Customers are stingy (think academic labs, supercomputer centers etc.), are not typically married to your solution architecture so for every purchase they will put out a tender that you have to bid for and win.- Performance is king, which means very expensive R&amp;D, and customers don&#x27;t spend much on all these &quot;enterprise value-adds&quot; that enterprise focused businesses use to pad their bottom lines.

IBM is sliding into irrelevance in the mass market for sure, but they&#x27;ve still got a sizeable slice of the HPC&#x2F;supercomputing market and their research in quantum computing is hard to overlook.

I seem to recall Gil Amelio once saying something similar...

Not likely according to CNBC interview [1]:&gt; Rometty told CNBC that the deal should not be interpreted as part of any plan for her to transition out of her position as CEO at IBM.&gt; &quot;I&#x27;m still young and I&#x27;m not going anywhere,&quot; she told CNBC.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-deal-valued-at-34-billion.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-de...</a>

Lovely idea that won&#x27;t be possible. All that brilliance and inspiring leadership from Red Hat will be overwhelmed by the tsunami if indifference that is IBM corporate culture. On the plus side, if you&#x27;re looking to hire real OSS talent for your team, I suspect a bunch of Red Hat folks will be on the market as soon as their contractual lockups expire.

&gt; If IBM has one brain cell left, they&#x27;ll pull a NeXT&#x2F;Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company.Honestly, I could see that happening and working out great .. for legacy IBM customers. But if you aren&#x27;t an existing IBM mainframe&#x2F;midrange shop, there will be only tangental benefits for you.To go with your Jobs analogy, the original iMac was all about preserving legacy Mac users. The new customers had to come in from a different angle. Does either RedHat or IBM have the angle?

Ginny has drained the life out of IBM -- and not in a good way.

If IBM has one brain cell left, they&#x27;ll pull a NeXT&#x2F;Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company.That is the one path to a real future for IBM instead of its slow decline into complete irrelevance.

Hearing this, nothong else than a big f word comes out of my mouth.

Ay ay ay... if this is true then everything from RH is gonna get fatter, slower and more expensive.Add a bit of WebSphere here, a bit of Domino there and voila. It&#x27;ll then be ready for &#x27;resource action&#x27; (aka layoffs).Jokes aside, RH is an engineer-focussed business - IBM is an accountant-focussed business. There&#x27;s just NO way these two cultures are going to work well together.

Remember when NeXT bought Apple with Apple&#x27;s money? If there&#x27;s meaningful Red Hat leadership being put at the helm at IBM as part of the deal, it might not be hideous news. But if it&#x27;s the usual acquisition, well I cannot imagine more incompatible cultures than IBM and Red Hat, integration seems very unlikely.

If this happens, I see older engineers targeted by IBM as they have done over the for &quot;cost savings&quot; as part of the acquisition.

It already is a major tech hub (top 10 in the nation, pretty close to top 5). But I agree that this isn&#x27;t a good sign for RTP.

Welp, there goes any chance Research Triangle Park ever had of being a major tech hub.

Spectrum Scale Support is one of the most horrific things I&#x27;ve encountered in my entire professional career.

IBM would rather push Spectrum Scale&#x2F;GPFS over Ceph or Gluster

It goes much deeper than that, Red Hat maintains or contributes regularly to a wide swath of the Linux ecosystem. They also have a policy of open sourcing acquisitions. If the deal goes through, it&#x27;s a dark day for open source software.

Yeah the whole freedesktop.org stack is to a large extent RedHat folks.

Also in practice glibc, systemd, GNOME, etc. have a ton of maintainers from Red Hat, even if they&#x27;re not Red Hat-owned the way Ansible or Ceph is.

It seems to me that Red Hat is based on Fedora. Fedora being the fast release gratis community version and Red Hat the slow release commercial corporate version.Then CentOS would the community gratis version of Red Hat.

Add Fedora to the list - while technically a community project, Red Hat is the main contributor.

I doubt it. When you read the IBM and Core OS acquisition press releases side by side you get a lot of the same &quot;hybrid cloud&quot; language.Update: Near as I can tell the acquisition completed in March&#x2F;April.

Also Atomic&#x2F;CoreOS - this will probably be cut now, perhaps even before it is complete.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectatomic.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;welcome-to-fedora-coreos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projectatomic.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;welcome-to-fedora-c...</a>

WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues.  We&#x27;ll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.

Is openshift really open source? I was under the impression that nobody really runs origin on its own since it&#x27;s far too hard. It seemed more like they just wanted to point out but it&#x27;s open source, but you need support and a lot of know-how to actually use it.

SUSE? They make a big song and dance (literally) of being open source, but I don&#x27;t know if they&#x27;re exclusively OSS.

I don&#x27;t know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS.Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they&#x27;re not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.

On the other hand it might mean the end for SystemD!zing!

Agreed. Seems that most $largeco I come across used to use IBM AIX and are switching to RHEL. This seems more strategic than surface level only.

You might want to read up on your Aesop’s fables ;)

- kernel development- OpenShiftI very much doubt these 2 are in any danger. In fact, I&#x27;d say these are the golden eggs IBM wants.

The OpenShift folks sit on a ton of critical posts in the Kubernetes project.  I&#x27;d suspect this is what IBM wants, but it&#x27;s a risk that they stop contributing to the open source project.

Also CoreOS, recently acquired by Redhat.

Mostly useless projects though for people that want speed and Linux-native open source.

Meh. They have a bad reputation due to calling open word source software cancer the new windows business model.Also, while their engineers are certainly smart, their software seems very crusty (the down side of infinite backwards compatibility) and usually doesn&#x27;t play well at all with existing open source software. Thus: Mostly useless.

How on earth is Microsoft &quot;absolutely&quot; behind OSS? Which of their main products is Open Source? Windows? Office? SQL Server? Azure? Exchange? What exactly makes Microsoft a company &quot;absolutely behind OSS?&quot;Their stupid boot loader still ignores any other operating system for god&#x27;s sake.Kudos to people at Microsoft&#x27;s Marketing and &quot;developer relations&quot; department who won the hearts of developers by allowing TypeScript and VSCode to be FOSS. Suddenly MS is &quot;Absolutely behind OSS&quot;.

&gt; I don&#x27;t know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS.Doesnt Microsoft tick all those boxes? Even if they aren&#x27;t exclusively an open source company, they are &quot;absolutely behind OSS&quot; if you go by how much open source code they have contributed.

Exactly, these are products to monetize and make money from.

Because IBM ruins everything it touches?It’s possible they don’t want to. But they will.

Super pessimistic point of view. Why do you think these are all in danger? These are things that people and more importantly enterprises use. Why would IBM ruin that?

They _did_ pay a lot of money to acquire them, so there&#x27;s a reason to believe they&#x27;re committed to fully integrating RH technology. Considering Jim, who certainly has an interest in the survival of open source software, signed this off also gives some hope.

Also with RH&#x27;s recent acquisition of CoreOS, that suite will also be in IBM&#x27;s arena. 
I work for &quot;a corporate&quot;. We used to be big IBM shops (AIX, IBM Java, websphere, etc, etc...). But AIX is now hardly used and neither is websphere. It&#x27;s mostly off the shelf k8s, wildfly and other open source projects deployed on RHEL (not my personal favorite since its kernel is way behind the times).
I think this is IBMs way of playing catch up in the arena. I worry how they will handle entrenched &quot;political interests&quot; - e.g. Webpshere&#x2F;AIX&#x2F;etc.. and the more open source friendly RedHat suite. Pretty sure its going to be one big mess in a few years time.

Pivotal is probably next in line for size for independent enterprise OSS but still a fraction the size of Red Hat, at under $1b in revenue.  And some proprietary bits.

Where elsewhere? The landscape of options to be paid for your OSS has just become a barren field.Yes, OSS as a concept can survive only on gratis work. However I&#x27;m not sure the portfolio of projects supported largely by Red Hat maintainers could. If maintainers are forced to start walking as they did with Oracle I expect to see quite a few projects fall into disrepair.

Red Hat&#x27;s Open Source only approach does mean that none of these projects can be closed down, though: AFAIK, IBM are acquiring people and a brand, but no significant proprietary IP. If higher-ups at IBM turn out to be as clueless as Oracle, then key engineers will just walk and continue working on those projects elsewhere.

Guys, this is not just, or mainly not RH Linux. :(- kernel development- Ansible- JBoss (I know HN hates Java, especially Java EE, but it was and is an important factor in enterprise OSS adoption)- OpenShift- Ceph, GlusterAll these are in danger, not just RHEL. I don&#x27;t know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS. Canonical is way behind Red Hat in terms of revenue (1&#x2F;20).Sad.

Many companies are OSS friendly, but I think being OSS friendly is different than building your whole organization on OSS. RH does the latter, many-many companies are the former.

Their J9 JDK alongside with WebSphere AS.

I&#x27;m sure that you can draw a line where it does not count as &quot;core product&quot;, but Eclipse has to count as something.

There was an era when IBM&#x27;s &quot;core products&quot; were hardware. I think today their &quot;core product&quot; is consulting.Open source hardware exists but is rare. I don&#x27;t know what it means to open source consulting?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JFS_(file_system)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JFS_(file_system)</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openpowerfoundation.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openpowerfoundation.org&#x2F;</a>

To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware it&#x27;s like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it.RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn&#x27;t necessarily open, and it&#x27;s not yet really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)

OpenBMC is worked on by the OzLabs group (which is the core of some of their mainframe BMCs), as well as lots of work around POWER9 and s390. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, they are a proprietary shop at the end of the day, but they do an incredible amount of free software work.

They have many (you might argue some are somewhat autist but there are):
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.ibm.com&#x2F;code&#x2F;open&#x2F;projects&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.ibm.com&#x2F;code&#x2F;open&#x2F;projects&#x2F;</a>And they also do several contributions, e.g. openstack, linux kernelI would agree that IBM is not pop enough and that their motivation is usually not based on ideals or a social contract.EDIT: I forgot IBM Blockchain, which you might think it is not &quot;core&quot; just because the company is still divided between areas like services, consulting and hardware...<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;IBM-Blockchain" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;IBM-Blockchain</a>

Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.

As a result of this news, though, wouldn&#x27;t you be inclined to suspect that the hostile faction just took a massive blow?

The problem (as an ex-IBMer) is that that friendlyness is only in parts of the company; much of IBM is open-source hostile.

In other words, RH is too big to merge quickly. When it&#x27;s all said and done (in at most 3 years), expect a new post talking about &quot;increased synergy&quot; where RH will go through major a reorg to be merged into the borg.This is all very sad.

&quot;IBM further says, &quot;Upon closing of the acquisition, Red Hat will join IBM&#x27;s Hybrid Cloud team as a distinct unit, preserving the independence and neutrality of Red Hat&#x27;s open source development heritage and commitment, current product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, and unique development culture. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat&#x27;s current management team. Jim Whitehurst also will join IBM&#x27;s senior management team and report to Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat&#x27;s headquarters, facilities, brands and practices.&quot;&quot;

IBM has been very open source friendly over the last 20 years, more so as of recently.

That URL looks like the best one so far, so we&#x27;ll use it. Thanks!

Editors: This really should be the top link. Additionally, there&#x27;s more detail in the email sent to RedHat employees, published here:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;red-hat-ibm-creating-leading-hybrid-cloud-provider" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;red-hat-ibm-creating-leading-...</a>Edit: Notably, from Jim Whitehurst&#x27;s email:&gt; ... When the transaction closes, as I noted above, [Red Hat] will be a distinct unit within IBM and I will report directly to [IBM chair, president, and CEO] Ginni [Rometty].

Redhat website confirmed it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en</a>

you should read the latest earnings statements, growth was declined and a huge miss of estimateshence the IBM merge, Redhat probably felt they couldn&#x27;t do it anymore on their own

I think when you figure out why Amazon is currently losing to Microsoft you will also understand why Red Hat, just like Docker, was completely crushed by Google, and why IBM, despite trying super hard, wasn&#x27;t even a player until now.

Where do you see any of that represented in Red Hat&#x27;s business performance? Their growth has been strong the last five years and shows no sign of high stress or decline being imminent. They&#x27;re tracking to solidly double their sales over four years from the end of fiscal 2015.

The real story here is that cloud is killing them both.

relevant line:&gt; The CoreOS corporation was purchased by Red Hat in January 2018 for a purchase price of $250 million.[71]

Good thing we&#x27;re using CoreOS instead of Red Hat.&#x2F;me looks at the CoreOS article on WikipediaFuck.

Well, fuck. I spent the last couple of years completely revamping my UNIX support group. I got rid of all the weak SAs and used a mix of in person and online vendor training plus internal challenges to elevate everyone&#x27;s skills. We were able to completely repurpose the &quot;Level 3&quot; UNIX engineering group because all the &quot;Level 2&quot; guys no longer needed to escalate to Level 3 for anything.Critical to that was buying RedHat Learning Subscription and pushing my top guys through RedHat&#x27;s Certified Architect program. But I&#x27;m skeptical but we&#x27;d have the same leverage to obtain similar learning discounts from IBM.Honestly as my org gets more comfortable with pure open source solutions it may be time to just consider Fedora instead, particularly as our workloads are moving from bare metal to VMs to containers it arguably means less and less where the app is hosted anyway.In the end it may mean RHEL going the way of Solaris as ever dearer license fees combined with a drop in support quality undermines their value proposition.But I guess that&#x27;s a problem for the next guy; my org transformation is done so I took a job doing provisioning using Terraform.

Just using it as a big workstation. Firefox, Krita, LibreOffice. The software has improved to the point where it can realistically be a daily driver (that can also compile Firefox at -j24 on this octocore SMT-4 machine in about a half hour).

Out of curiosity what sort of workloads are you running on a Talos II?

For those of us running Red Hat or Fedora on IBM POWER, though (I run Fedora 28 on a Talos II), this is probably a good sign of future commitment. Hopefully they don&#x27;t screw up Fedora maintaining the enterprise side.

It Red hat and later canonical were bought by some companies.This is going to be a big setback to open-source software as both compaines contribute a lot to Linux distroes.Smaller companies will find it hard to rely or choose a distribution.If IBM acquires Red hat, I hope they leave it alone.

Judging by IBM’s history over the last 20 years I suspect this is akin to putting Satan at the wheel and giving him a bottle of Jack Daniels.Several layers of abstraction down the line I get the feeling this will hurt us ansible and centos users now they have been pulled under the umbrella.What happened to companies standing tall and alone?

Well, thank you for the uncalled-for insult!

RH has been full of corporate drones for a while. You&#x27;ll fit right in after the acquisition.

Welp, just as I got hired to work at Red Hat. :(

This is terrible news, I really hope this deal does not go through, get blocked by shareholders or by anti-trust laws.I also remember that IBM is not doing good - profits are decreasing and their software and services division fail to produce any innovation for the last years.Did IBM need to buy whole RH to strengthen their cloud offering? Couldnt they just partnered with RH cloud division, leaving RH Core team independent?

Good luck IT-blessing kernel changes at BigCo-s. And what would be the purpose of a BigCo buying RHEL if one has to mock around with kernel afterwards? Anyway though, the RH not being a cloud player that has been making it obsolete too.

You know you can run your own kernel, right?

RH fell behind the times. Their paradigm of a stable though an  older kernel was suitable for the times when kernel wasn&#x27;t that stable and things in the industry were developed slower than today. I work in a big enterprise space and usually we do Ubuntu if we can and SUSE Enterprise if we can&#x27;t :), i recently tried Docker&#x2F;Kubernetes on a recent RHEL - looking at the kernel version i already didn&#x27;t expect the stuff to work  and of course it didnt work (no complete namespaces features support). Their push for their own custom software platform instead is a good match for IBM.

What is your reasoning? In the other HN news thread, there were some people specifically worried about Fedora after the acquisition

This is a cloud play ... But they&#x27;re like late by a decade, hmm interesting times!

So now everyone will be wearing blue pyjamas and talk about Watson while not delivering anything.Seriously.Can anyone explain why this would be good?

IBM is a sales-driven company that mainly focuses on closed-source proprietary software. Red Hat is an engineer-focused, innovation driven company that&#x27;s completely built around the open-source Linux kernel.The two worlds just seem incompatible to me, and I assume a lot of people share the same concern as I do.

I&#x27;m of two minds to this. I have a personal POWER6 running AIX and it handles my main hosting and mail. It&#x27;s a great box and I love the hardware, but the IBM salesdroids would never talk to me (I do all my business through a VAR), and the CUoD nonsense and having to use a whole separate HMC to manage the single LPAR is obnoxious.On the other hand, I absolutely love my Talos II. It&#x27;s not an IBM machine, but it&#x27;s engineered by them; the POWER9 is IBM, a lot of the OpenPOWER and PowerNV stuff is still as IBM designed it, and IBM contributes hardware support.So I understand this feeling when dealing with IBM as a vendor. They suck. But I think IBM hardware is solid and their R&amp;D is top-notch, and I&#x27;d buy IBM again (just not from them).

1. DB2 is a damn good database imho. 
2. And J9 was the fastest JVM when I benchmarked it about a year ago using jmh. 
3. And I think Websphere Liberty is a damn fine app server also. 
4. I really like Power based CPUs. 
5. Talos is made possible because of the open approach that IBM had in creating the power platform.
6. I think loopback is pretty cool also.

Try to use something made by IBM and then tell us if you like it.

Can anyone walk me through the reasoning behind all this IBM hatred? What&#x27;s going on? I thought they just sell mainframes.

I hope CoreOS succeeds regardless. It has built a very nice ecosystem around it.

This affects on so many open source projects in addition to RHEL. ANSIBLE, Ceph, OpenShift, Linux kernel, JBoss as well as everything Red Hat acquired from CoreOS.

First Microsoft buying GitHub and now IBM buying Red Hat.I wonder how the next year will be for Linux and open source in general, looks like we are going to have a lot of drama.

“Y buys X for it to operate distinctly within Y.” usually doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t imply independence.

Hoping they will stick to this:&quot;IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community
Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team&quot;I guess this was an important part of the deal, otherwise it wouldn&#x27;t make much sense.

The problem being that forked projects rarely get much traction. Look at Devuan. Only the very hard core Debian fanboys moved over. Sure, it&#x27;s nice not having systemd, but the project will never have the user base and developer support that its parent project enjoys. Maybe, though, with RH being bought out, people will take a second look. I&#x27;ve always favoured Debian over RH for servers, as the upgrade path is dead simple and almost always works. RH&#x2F;CentOS is a tough row to hoe in this regard comparitively.

Probably if things go wrong, every community will just fork the code and move on.

Unless I&#x27;m mistaken, almost all of open source is driven by corporate development. The linux kernel is an alright example: roughly 85% of development seems to be sponsored by a corporation[1]. I felt a little weird when I first learned that[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2610207&#x2F;open-source-software&#x2F;who-writes-linux--corporations--more-than-ever.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2610207&#x2F;open-source-softwa...</a>

The BSDs are all open source and not tied to anyone. Since operating systems are literally key components of being free, this truly matters. Red Hat had too much of a grip on Linux (kernel), the userland and much more. systemd, while an atrocity on its own, has now become a requirement for certain userland software projects, which is heresy. So much for the tenet of a software program doing one thing well.

God help us.Will there be any independent open source&#x2F;open source friendly company that isn&#x27;t controlled by some corporate giant?

&gt; Microsoft&#x27;s first CEO is still chairmanBill Gates is no longer the chairman of Microsoft. He stepped down in 2014 to concentrate on the Gates Foundation.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microsoft</a> (see &quot;Key people&quot; in the sidebar)

&quot;Microsoft&#x27;s first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines.&quot; this is not true? maybe you meant he&#x27;s a technical adviser

&gt; Microsoft&#x27;s first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelinesIt&#x27;d be super awkward if TJ Watson was still leading IBM from the sidelines.

Microsoft has been doing a lot to rebuild itself as a cloud provider.IBM has been doing a lot to go out of business.Microsoft&#x27;s first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from the sidelines.IBM is a floating raft of failed leadership.Microsoft isn&#x27;t trusted fully by the community but they are making inroads under their new CEO.IBM has been firing its most senior people in an effort to slow its cash burn and to hire younger folks. IBM also claims it&#x27;s also to bring on folks with more relevant skills to emerging technologies. I think there is a lawsuit about this.Anyway, IBM has done nothing in recent years to show they are a true contender.If the Redhat team is able to pull a Next here and assume leadership roles inside of IBM this could be stellar. Big Blue&#x27;s formidable sales team and reputation with a great product line overseen by passionate people would be powerful.If the IBM existing leadership team emerges as the winners here it will likely continue to fade into irrelevance.

Is there a hell for corporations?To add some substance to my comment. I’ve interacted with IBM in different scenarios. I’ve had to manage a team of IBM consultants at work, very frustrating experience. I still shed tears every time I think the hourly rate paid vs the value they provided. When Watson was being hipped the company I was working for was approached to use the tech and come up with some PoCs, the dissonance between the biz dev pitch and the actual “solution” was abismal. Currently I’m at a different company and we have IBM as one of our customers, the image that comes to mind is a headless chicken running around.
That is to say, not a very impressive impression. I’ve to say that I’ve seen some interesting stuff as well. But I’m still very sad about the buyout

sir, you make a good point.  the world always changes.  microsoft has changed, perhaps IBM has also.  one who believes in sin and redemption perhaps should give IBM a chance.

Thing is, IBM does not have a great reputation for how it manages its staff as it tends to favour moving positions to low cost locations and redundancies that provide the minimum possible payoutse.g.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;18&#x2F;ibm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;18&#x2F;ibm&#x2F;</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;29&#x2F;ibm_layoffs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;29&#x2F;ibm_layoffs&#x2F;</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;ibm_tss&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;ibm_tss&#x2F;</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;ibm_gts_workforce_offshoring_ratio&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;ibm_gts_workforce_o...</a>(and that&#x27;s just from this year)they also have a reputation for being primarily concerned with the bottom line (profit-wise) over other drivers.So concerns around how they&#x27;ll manage this kind of acquisition seem at least somewhat justified.

My impression is that POWER is more suitable for certain types of scientific computation that require high degrees of precision rather than for general purpose enterprise use.  POWER9 is the only CPU architecture out there that has support for quad-precision floats.  Alas, no CPU exists with support for octuple floats, since only astrophysicists need that level of precision.

Based on your subcomment about evaluation, I&#x27;m very interested to hear your opinions about Talos&#x27; offerings - up to now I&#x27;ve only heard anecdotes from individuals drinking the security+ownership kool-aid.What IBM offers is probably a lot more coherent and takes better advantage of what the POWER architecture has to offer, such as larger quantities of RAM, the per-node interconnect fabric, faster I&#x2F;O (not just PCIe), etc (admittedly totally naive here). Plus of course there&#x27;s z&#x2F;OS, which I know enough about to respect (and want to play with someday :) ).Talos basically offers only Linux and a mildly DIY standing-up experience (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tenfourfox.blogspot.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;a-semi-review-of-raptor-talos-ii.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tenfourfox.blogspot.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;a-semi-review-of-rap...</a>), although this is likely to be reasonably painless for non-desktop configurations (and perhaps volume orders can come preconfigured).As a bit of a pet idea I kind of want to colocate one of the 2U or 4U systems for generic web serving and similar duties, but I fear that running a blog&#x2F;discussion system on such a machine may result in a constant effort (on my part) at keeping discussion focused on the &quot;it&#x27;s a different architecture, what comp-sci interesting things can we do with it&quot; aspect instead of getting distracted by shallow OCD-meta-security bikeshedding.(It&#x27;s kind of sad that the collective consensus about new&#x2F;different architectures has to always be about security nowadays, and not about unbiased exploration, which is what we&#x27;re best at)

I&#x27;ve followed POWER for a while now, and it seems to be mostly marketing hype. The POWER8 was not much better than the Xeons out, and had almost no availability. POWER9 excels at a lot of IO-bound tasks, but again, it&#x27;s nearly impossible to find. It doesn&#x27;t help that there are very few systems you can buy out there. On paper, the POWER9 looks awesome. Then you look closer at the actual architecture and realize that a lot of pieces of the design are weird and&#x2F;or seem somewhat useless. It also doesn&#x27;t help that they&#x27;re extremely expensive, especially since there are so few options.So while I&#x27;d like IBM to compete with Intel, they need to pony up more money if they really want to push the industry. Don&#x27;t make it so hard to buy one, and publish benchmarks&#x2F;comparisons with Intel.

I&#x27;m surprised at the amount of backlash here.IBM&#x27;s had the Linux Technology Center (LTC) for a long time and has been contributing to the community. All the platforms Z, POWER etc... support Linux as a first class citizen and plenty of other ecosystems are also supported (i.e GCC, OpenJDK, etc...)Maybe its time to re-evaluate the old biases? The old incumbents like Microsoft have warmed up to OSS, not sure why Big-Blue is getting this much flak.

IBM acquires Red Hat